The Bayard station seized in Naples, on 3 October 1839 the first train in Italy left from there
[ad_1]
history
NoonFebruary 8, 2023 – 3:12 pm
On board was with King Ferdinand II. The journey inaugurated the first Italian railway, the Naples-Portici: the route, on a 7.25 km long double track line, was completed in nine and a half minutes amidst wings of incredulous and enthusiastic citizens
Of Mirella Armiero
The first Italian railway, the Naples-Portici, was inaugurated on a splendid sunny day, October 3, 1839. On board was Ferdinand II of Bourbon, the reformer king, with the whole family, together with a hundred personalities and officers of the realm; the band of the royal guard traveled on the last of the eight carriages. The convoy, hauled by the Vesuvius steam locomotive, set off with great pomp from the Bayard station in Naples, the same station which has been in conditions of absolute decay for years, reduced to ruins, despite the repeated efforts of Fai Campania, and which is now being seized because it is reduced to illegal parking. The route, on a 7.25 km long double-track line, was completed in nine and a half minutes amidst wings of incredulous and enthusiastic citizens. An absolute record for the times, destined to be heralded among the primates of the South in the dispute still open between detractors and supporters of the Unification of Italy and its effects on the former Kingdom of the Two Sicilies.
The project
The signature for the project of the innovative, very modern railway dates back to just three years earlier. In June 1836 the king offered the engineer Armando Giuseppe Bayard de la Vingtrie the concession for the construction of a railway line from Naples to Nocera Inferiore, with a branch for Castellammare. In 1939 the Naples – Portici section was ready, in exceptional times for a public work of that magnitude. In the original intentions, the railway should have subsequently connected the capital with Brindisi; connection that still does not exist for two hundred years after the Bourbons. The new means of transport aroused the curiosity of Neapolitans and foreign visitors: in the first two months of operation, the railway registered a movement of 130,000 travellers. Ferdinand II of Bourbon was a sovereign attentive to modernity and innovation as a tool for development. But often “his” railway has been dismissed by historians as an expensive and useless toy, a display of technology in a territory that is in many ways problematic, afflicted by poverty and backwardness. Certainly for the Bayard station, a vestige of a time when Naples was the capital of a kingdom, it does not deserve to be erased from memory. When the Bourbons fell, the station was abandoned and then assigned to the Dopolavoro Ferroviario which transformed it into the Teatro Italia, destroyed in 1943 following the explosion of the ship Caterina Costa leaving for Africa loaded with tanks and ammunition.
Fai’s commitment
Fai Campania nominated the station among “Places of the Heart” and tried to recover its memory; many Neapolitans do not know that that tufa skeleton, in Corso Garibaldi, half hidden by wild vegetation, is what remains of the glorious station, the pride of the South. The architect Aldo Loris Rossi, who died in 2018, had signed a restoration project that would have transformed it into a Museum of Road Communications and a tourist information center. However, Naples is full of museums that have never been built and this one of the Bayard station remained only on paper. It should have been connected to the Circumvesuviana, illustrated on the Fai website, “by means of a sort of entrance of honor representing, in fact, the gateway to the archaeological area of Herculaneum and Pompeii”. “At the head of the tracks”, Fai suggests, “there could be some vintage locomotives and carriages such as those currently on display at the Pietrarsa Railway Museum. The work would completely change the perspective of this important area of Naples”. For now, dreams stop behind the preventive seizure signs.
The Corriere del Mezzogiorno newsletter
If you want to stay updated on the news of Campania, subscribe for free to the Corriere del Mezzogiorno newsletter. Arrives daily straight to your inbox at 12 noon. Just click here.
February 8, 2023 | 3:12pm
© REPRODUCTION RESERVED
[ad_2]
Source link
