In a new Wallpaper* summer series, architect Carlo Ratti explores Italy through the ordinary objects that define daily life. Meet the Telepass, the design that ended the toll booth queue
Carlo Ratti on the Telepass
For decades, Italy’s great summer car exodus was captured by one well-defined image: the queue at the toll booth. Millions of cars on the A1, the A14, the A30 heading south, engines overheating, children crying in the back seat and, up ahead, a funnel of concrete. A frantic hunt for coins, tickets clenched between teeth, unnatural contortions through the diesel fumes of the car in front. The toll booth was a purgatorial rite in the fullest sense. Then, one day, a beep arrived.
We are in a garage belonging to Sixcom, an Olivetti spin-off, in late 1986. Three engineers, 24 and 25 years old, build a flat plastic transponder that an antenna can read while the vehicle is moving. One is versed in hardware, two in software. The prototype starts working within a 120 days. In 1989, in time for the Italia ’90 World Cup, the world’s first nationwide electronic toll-collection system arrives.
Over time, it would become a fully fledged mobility platform. An invention that earned one of Harvard Business School’s celebrated case studies, where it was even compared, in impact, to Netflix. As if innovation were the most interesting part. The most interesting part is the beep.
That confirmatory tone, the one you hear as the barrier lifts, is perhaps the most universally recognised sound of Italian motoring life. More than a horn, more than the rasp of a moped, more than the click of a speed camera. It is the sound of the toll booth disappearing. The Telepass has replaced purgatory with a single syllable. And today the same system has spread well beyond national borders, expanding into other countries.
The object itself is spectacularly ugly. A grey-beige rectangle of anonymous plastic, velcroed to the windscreen. The feeling, though – what the jargon calls UI/UX, user interface and user experience – is revolutionary. Like Nutella, the gadget has become a common noun. Italians do not say the ‘electronic toll-collection device’. They say the ‘Telepass’. When subscription prices doubled in 2024 and competition finally arrived, millions of Italians felt the strange sensation of discovering an object they had been looking through, without seeing it, for 30 years.
And for 30 years, the beep was also a data event. Each transaction records position, time, speed. Multiply all of it by ten million devices and two million daily transits and you have one of the largest real-time mobility-sensing networks in the world. At the Senseable City Lab, we have been studying exactly this kind of infrastructure, which reveals the breath of the city: where it congests, when it speeds up, and when it stops. The Telepass has done so since 1989, even before the expression ‘smart city’ was coined.
Summer has arrived, the exodus looms. Millions of Telepass units are preparing for their 15 seconds of glory: the barrier lifts, the beep confirms, Italy sets off again towards the sea. No halting, no coins, no ticket between the teeth. Purgatory is over. What remains is the beep.
About 'Objectify' – a summer series from Italy by Carlo Ratti
Italy’s design canon has been told many times. The Bialetti moka pot, the Vespa, the Fiat 500, the Arco floor lamp: you know the list, and so does every airport bookshop and first-year design student. This column will discuss, poke, investigate, prod, ridicule and beatify the less glamorous Italian objects. They are the ones you ought to know, so that when you visit Italy, or spot apparitions of it on a friend’s social media, you can smugly point out: ‘Did you know the mosquito coil is a masterpiece of Italian design? The condom? The motorway toll transponder?’ Objects so ordinary that Italians walk past them, or handle them every day, without registering that someone, with a mellifluous surname, designed them.
Carlo Ratti
Proust wrote a seven-volume novel because a small cake dipped in tea, the madeleine, unlocked an involuntary flood of memory. For followers of the Italian version of this column, published weekly in Il Sole 24 Ore, the nation’s favourite Sunday read, perhaps these objects will have a similar effect. For you, anglophone readers peering at this somewhere between Rummidge and Euforia, they offer something else: beach conversation topics, an eye trained on unexpected places, and perhaps a few new madeleines for when you visit the peninsula yourself. After all, objects are never just objects. As the great Milanese designer Achille Castiglioni of Arco-floor-lamp fame once declared: ‘objects should keep us company’. Especially during this scorching summer.