The road is also the first toll road of its kind. Along the motorway there were toll booths where you had to pay at a barrier to use the connection. At the time, this cost a motorist with a normal passenger car 10 lire. On the occasion of the hundredth anniversary, no toll will be charged on Saturday. The driving force behind the motorway was the Milanese engineer and senator Piero Puricelli (1883-1951). He himself lived in the difficult to reach lake area and, according to the news site varesenews.it, had already had a road paved at his own expense in 1921 to get home faster. It was the first paved road in Italy, a country that in 1924 had only 80,000 cars, buses or trucks. Today there are almost 40 million passenger cars in the country alone. In Germany, a similar dual carriageway motorway, the AVUS, had existed since 1921, but that road was designed and built as a race track rather than for road traffic. The AVUS (Autobahn and practice road) southwest of Berlin was used as a race track until 1998. The first real German ‘Autobahn’ opened in 1932, a year before Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) came to power. In the Netherlands, the first motorway was opened in 1937. The Rijksweg 12, now the A12, ran from Voorburg to Zoetermeer at the time. In Belgium, the first section of motorway was built near Bruges in 1937 as part of what would become the Brussels – Ostend motorway. Based on the number of kilometres of motorway per 1000 square kilometres, Belgium has the most motorways in the world, with the Netherlands in second place.
Source: www.autoweek.nl
