Ingegneria dell’emergenza: ponti portatili “made in Italy” (1876-1945)

In the framework of international history of temporary bridges for military and emergency use, Italian engineering brings an original contribution, focused to the development of the metal portable structures. Since late 1880s to World War II, the portable bridge, featured by lightness, transportability and easy assembly procedure, was the subject of a unique experimentation in order to improve the typology by national inventions and adaptations of foreign models. The development of novel construction methods and original structural solutions proposed, during time, by different actors, traced an original story. In the 1880s, the introduction of portable bridges, facing railway fast construction and modern war needs, was the occasion for the daring technical and commercial comparison between the Italian inventions of the engineer Alfredo Cottrau (1839-1898) and the ones of the French Gustav Eiffel (1832-1923). Then, at the turn of the century, the “Eiffel system”, adopted by the “Genio Ferrovieri” and produced by the Italian firm “Officine Nazionali di Savigliano”, was gradually transformed form the French invention into an Italian product, enriched by original structural characters and novel construction procedures. Lastly, during the World War II, the “Italian-ization” of foreign types was successfully addressed to most established standard typologies with “unusual methods”: proposed by local artisanal knowledge Italian this procedures, discovered to be effective in construction time and structural performance, have been coded in American manuals. The study was carried out in the framework of the research project “SIXXI – 20th Century Structural Engineering: the Italian contribution” (Erc Adv. Grant, PI S. Poretti, T. Iori, University of Rome “Tor Vergata”) and is based on primary documental sources of military historical archives (ISCAG, Ufficio Storico SME)