Architect Carlo Ratti on why the Autogrill bridge is Italy's testbed for motorway design

In a new Wallpaper* summer series, architect Carlo Ratti explores Italy through the ordinary objects that define daily life. Meet the Autogrill Bridge, Italy’s ubiquitous motorway restaurant chain

Carlo Ratti on the Autogrill bridge

Here we are, in the middle of Italy's great summer exodus. Today we are driving along the ribbon of asphalt that links Milan to Naples, the Autostrada del Sole, “Highway of the Sun”. Through the shimmering afternoon heat, a vision appears ahead. What could it be? A truck that has strayed across the median? An oversized billboard? A giant frog about to leap, after plunging us into a Lilliputian world?

We accelerate, and a few hundred metres on, the mystery is solved… It is all three things at once: the Autogrill bridge (Autogrill is Italy’s ubiquitous motorway restaurant chain, so dominant that its brand name has become the generic word for a rest stop).

It straddles both carriageways with a shortcut that would be forbidden anywhere else on the motorway network. It is a branded landmark, complete with the inevitable Autogrill sign. And with its exposed structure, it resembles a nimble creature frozen in the instant before a jump.

Few people know that this innovative architectural type attracted some of post-war Italy's greatest architects and engineers, from Angelo Bianchetti to Pier Luigi Nervi.

In the 1960s, the motorway was one of the great stages on which modern Italy performed, and the bridge Autogrill became its suspended gallery. It connected not only the two sides of the road, but two Italies as well: north and south, outbound and homebound, families on the move during the summer migrations. At the time, Italy looked in awe at America's highways, yet instead of simply copying their model, it created something distinctly Italian: elegant, urban, and entirely its own.

One of Bianchetti's original drawings depicts the Montepulciano bridge Autogrill, now sadly demolished. Beneath a great asymmetrical T-shaped Corten-steel beam hangs the glazed bridge itself, visually lightened at one end by a dramatic cantilevered staircase. The carriageway below is so smooth it mirrors the sky. Along it glide improbable automobiles whose silhouettes recall Carlo Mollino's Bisiluro or Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion.

The real surprise, though, awaits upstairs. There, in the dining area, a sort of Newtonian inversion takes place. Looking through the windows that plunge directly over the traffic below, the building seems to rocket backwards at extraordinary speed while the cars remain perfectly still beneath it. 'It is impossible to step twice into the same river of sheet metal,' Heraclitus might have declared.

Even more impossible today, since the lack of long-term vision for Italy's motorways has led to the demolition of many of these remarkable structures. The iconic Montepulciano bridge Autogrill, mentioned earlier, was torn down in 2021. The one at Fiano Romano, just outside Rome, has stood closed for years and now risks the same fate. Many others simply deserve careful restoration to recover their original elegance.

Which is precisely why they deserve to be rediscovered. They could once again become what they once were: the manifesto of an optimistic country, confident enough to look to the future with lightness and imagination - and capable of creating elegance where one would least expect it, even above a ribbon of asphalt.

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.

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.

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