entry
Mar 2003, updated Feb 2023
Italy's First
Railway
Naples
in the avant guard: royal guard in the guard's van
by David Taylor ©
Inauguration, in
1839, of the first railway in
Italy, from Naples toPorticii.
It has become commonplace for economic historians to look at the last
fifty years of Bourbon Naples
and point out as obvious all the causes of political
and social crisis that rotted the kingdom from within
and allowed Garibaldi a
relatively easy victory in the Wars of Unification.
Things cannot have appeared so bad though in 1836 when the French engineer, Armand Bayard del la Vingtrie, approached the Bourbon Minister, Nicola Santangelo, with his plans to build a railway line from Naples to Nocera. From among all the Italian states which he could have chosen, he had opted for the one with a well established and proud dynasty that had already show great willingness to build itself a city worthy of being called a European capital. Perhaps he was also attracted by the fact that the Kingdom had embraced new naval technology in becoming the proud owner of the first steamship in the Mediterranean.
Bayard made Ferdinand II
an offer he could barely refuse: the Frenchman offered
to build what was to be the first railway in Italy at
his own cost in return for a 99 year lease. After a
series of Royal Decrees, he finally got the go-ahead —
with the terms of the lease reduced to 80 years. By the
3rd of October, 1839, the section of track running as
far as Portici was ready and was duly inaugurated on
that date with the first train ever to run on
Italian soil leaving Naples with carriages full of
officers of the army, artillery and navy, entertained on
their eleven minute journey by the Band of the Royal
Guard occupying the rear coach.
Technical feats involved in the construction had included 33 bridges, and work also continued to take the line as far as Nocera. While it is clear that such a short line can have had little impact on trade and commerce, the line proved extremely popular. 58,000 people travelled its length in the first month and extra locomotives had to be ordered from England replete with drivers and engineers.
If we need to discover what was really wrong with the economics of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in what were to prove the autumn years of its existence, we can perhaps learn something from the fact that following the enormous success of the railway they actually decided to lower the prices, offering discounts to "ladies without hats, servants in livery and non-commissioned officers"!
===================update Feb
2023==============================
Well,
what do you expect after almost 200 years?!
by jm
I don't buy that. I know — countless
wars, overpopulation, etc. Make your own list of ills
that beset the world. It's a long one. Yet there a lot
of places (including Naples) where buildings that looked
nice in 1840 still look nice
because they've been repaired and kept up, and seen as
culturally important enough to save. The Bayard train
station was such a site. In 2015, it was still pretty
nice with a sign outside proclaiming, "Italy's First
Train Station." You
could go in and see a bit of railroad history — a bit
out of the ordinary, and precisely because of that,
interesting.
The other day the Carabiniere Corps tasked with
safeguarding Italy's "cultural heritage" seized the
station and shut it down. They did so upon a directive
by the Italian State Prosecutor —
"the premises are "invaded by surrounding
landscape, need repairs to dilapidated sections, are
defaced and unsightly, and make illicit use of cultural,
archeological, historical, or artistic national
heritage." —a lot of legalese for "it has become a
filthy and dangerous parking lot. There may be an
economic rationale, Someone-or-Other's Law, that says
letting places go to hell employs a lot of people to
make it all look nice again. I don't know. I fell asleep
in "Econ 101:You Must Be Kidding" in college".
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