An outrageous claim and the rabbit hole that followed
After the trip to Genoa, I went to Rimini, on the other side of Italy, and visited the Italia in Miniatura theme park because it has a monorail. A simple loop around the park, with one station about as far from the entrance as it’s possible to get, it was a fun way to view the detailed scale models of famous Italian buildings below. But one thing caught my attention: a claim that this was Italy’s first electric monorail. Now, while the park was opened in 1970, the monorail wasn’t added until 2001 or so. This claim is somewhat dubious, when you consider that, not too far away, the Mirabilandia theme park had an electric monorail that operated between 1992 and 2019. Another theme park, Gardaland, has had an electric monorail since 1990.
So, what was the first electric monorail in Italy?
Well, Expo ’61 had an ALWEG monorail that was essentially the same as the one in Seattle.
The Turin monorail. Jean-Henri Manara, Wikimedia Commons, License CC BY-SA 2.0One of the stations still exists, but my trip to Genoa reminded me that this isn’t the first electric monorail in Italy by a long way.
The “Italian Colonial International Exhibition of Marine and Marine Hygiene” in 1914 had a quite impressive monorail, known as the “Telfer”, running along the seafront. A poster from the time describes it as a “Ferrovia Elletrica”, so definitely electric! After the exhibition closed, the monorail remained in use for a few years moving coal and goods around.
During my visit, a friend and I tried to trace the route, and see if anything remained. Unfortunately, the way was blocked by a small military base, but we did find the spot where a large arch had been smashed into a building to allow the monorail to go through the Stella Battery.
Roger Farnworth has written an excellent, copiously illustrated, article about the Telfer, so I will simply refer you there: Genoa – a Telfer
And that is, probably, the first electric monorail in Italy. The only earlier monorail I know about is a steam-powered, cable-hauled one that went up Mount Vesuvius.
#1910s #1960s #2000s #genoa #italy #monorail #rimini #steampunk #Turin
