Panoramic view of the Colle Isarco viaduct
Over the years the Fondazione ing. Lino Gentilini - ETS has carried out significant projects in collaboration with other institutions. A short account of some of these initiatives follows. At the foot of the page there is also a list of important institutions working in the field of construction history.
A project to catalogue and digitise the technical drawings of the Brenner motorway and the feasibility study for the Brenner railway axis and tunnel, carried out with the support of the Fondazione CARITRO in collaboration with TICCIH, INCUNA and Studio associato Virginia.
As part of its collaboration with the cultural initiatives of the Ordine degli Ingegneri della Provincia di Trento, the Fondazione ing. Lino Gentilini – ETS contributed to the exhibition Opere d’Ingegno, held from 24 June to 4 August 2025 at Palazzo Roccabruna in Trento. A display panel and an audiovisual installation were produced to tell the public about one particular work carried out during the construction of the Brenner motorway: the building of the viaduct crossing the Fortezza hydroelectric reservoir on the river Isarco.
Survey work carried out in the preliminary stages of excavation immediately established that the riverbed was not simply coarse fluvial alluvium but also contained substantial silt layers. In 1970 it was proposed to reinforce the excavation walls of the shafts that were to house the viaduct piers with three concentric rings of micropiles and with cement-bentonite grouting. However, because of the presence of water and of very fine silt layers, which could not be grouted, it proved impossible to excavate the shafts in dry conditions.
The designers therefore faced the challenge – a very complex one for the period – of excavating in the presence of water and in silty ground. In the winter of 1970–71 they decided to use, for the first time in Italy, a genuinely innovative technique to excavate the seven central shafts: the artificial freezing of the ground by the continuous circulation of liquid nitrogen at a temperature of about minus 190 degrees centigrade. In addition to the micropiles, further vertical bores were drilled to take the freezing probes and the probes monitoring the temperature of the “ice wall”. In all, some 10,000 m of additional drilling was carried out and about 6,000 cubic metres of liquid nitrogen were used to freeze the ground.
Great ingenuity brilliantly overcame a formidable technical challenge that had emerged as excavation began, and the work was then rapidly completed within a few months across the turn of 1971 and 1972. This innovative excavation technique, used on that occasion in a pioneering way, was employed again almost fifty years later during the construction of the Brenner railway tunnel, precisely for the underpass of the river Isarco about a kilometre north of Fortezza.
The exhibition on the website of the Ordine degli Ingegneri della Provincia di Trento
During 2024 the Fondazione ing. Lino Gentilini – ETS began a collaboration with the Fondazione Museo storico del Trentino and Autostrada del Brennero SpA for the exhibition La Via del Brennero. Il viaggio dalla Mitteleuropa al Mediterraneo, held from 11 April 2024 to 19 October 2025 at the Gallerie di Piedicastello in Trento.
As the exhibition poster explains, with the project La Via del Brennero the Fondazione Museo storico del Trentino and Autostrada del Brennero SpA, in collaboration with the Fondazione ing. Lino Gentilini, set out to prompt reflection on the meaning of the construction of the road as an engine of development for the region, within the wider cultural context that places the Brenner pass at the centre of a thousand-year history. The Fondazione ing. Lino Gentilini – ETS made available audiovisual material from its archive collections, shot on 16 mm film between 1973 and 1974, and took part in the opening event on 11 April 2024, also contributing a talk on the importance of the study of history.
As part of the same collaboration, the Fondazione ing. Lino Gentilini – ETS also provided a written contribution entitled Dalla storia il coraggio per il futuro, to be published in the sixth volume of the series Città Lineare – L’autostrada interconnessa, published by Autostrada del Brennero SpA and devoted to the exhibition.
This was an initiative of high cultural and educational standing, almost a necessary event, an indispensable prompt for reflection in the Trentino region, both from a local geographical standpoint and, more generally, from a contemporary perspective. Without lapsing into mere self-celebration, the exhibition managed on the one hand to tell, through a series of evocative routes, a story of great success born of the insight and the collaborations of this region and, on the other, through the judicious use of modern educational tools, to serve as a source of inspiration for new generations towards a serious technical and social commitment to a present and a future rich in challenges comparable to those that set in motion the building of the Brenner motorway in the 1960s and 1970s.
The exhibition on the website of the Fondazione Museo storico del Trentino
During 2023 the Fondazione ing. Lino Gentilini – ETS began a collaboration with arch. Claudia Zanda and arch. Elena Fontanella of the Politecnico di Milano, in preparation for the exhibition Mostra Autostrada Architettura Paesaggio nei territori attraversati dall’A22, held from late September 2023 to January 2024 at the Gallerie di Piedicastello in Trento.
After a first meeting on 31 March 2023, attended – besides those named above – by prof. Andrea Gritti of the Politecnico di Milano, meetings and contacts continued regularly from May onwards with a view to a careful selection of documentary material for the exhibition and its partial digitisation. Besides lending material, in original and in copy, the Foundation was to play an active part, taking part as a project partner alongside the Department of Architecture and Urban Studies of the Politecnico di Milano, Autostrada del Brennero SpA and the Fondazione Museo Storico del Trentino.
The work continued with research in the archive to locate the following material for use in the exhibition:
Steps were then taken for the participation of the Fondazione ing. Lino Gentilini – ETS in the event: the reproduction and digitisation of the documentary material, the loan and insurance of certain documents displayed in the exhibition, and the direct purchase of the frames in which the technical drawings were mounted.
The exhibition on the website of the Fondazione Museo storico del Trentino
Between 2015 and 2020 the Fondazione ing. Lino Gentilini – ETS worked with dr. ing. Gianluca Capurso and prof. Tullia Iori of the University of Rome Tor Vergata, supplying material from the technical and administrative section of the historical archive for the research of the project XX Century Structural Engineering: The Italian Contribution.
During 2012 the Fondazione ing. Lino Gentilini – ETS supplied the researcher and historian of photography Roberto Caccialanza with material from the photographic section of the historical archive for the preparation of the chapter Il ponte dell’autostrada A21, within the splendid publication I ponti sul Po fra Cremona e Castelvetro (1862-2012) – Immagini inedite, storia, curiosità, gente e vita sul Grande Fiume.
The collection of oral testimony by the Fondazione ing. Lino Gentilini – ETS is intended to complement the historical research and the cataloguing of the Foundation's archive and, independently, to stand as a resource for study in its own right for those who use the Foundation. The following testimonies have been recorded and are being processed:
These contributions will be extended over the years and compiled into audiovisual material that will be made available to the public.
The following list, neither exhaustive nor final, gathers international institutions engaged in significant and fundamental work in the study of construction history, offered here as a point of reference for the reader.