A pretty pass
AFTERTHOUGHT JOHN WELLS
Italy—The Brenner Pass is not normally thought of as a tourist resort. The surrounding mountains, it is true, provide breathtaking climbs for the amateur mountaineer, and the road through the pass from Innsbruck to the South Tyrol is thick with hotels with overhanging roofs and small painted hovels advertising rooms with running water. The pass itself, though, has not yet been put on the map to any great extent by the organisers of package tours or cut-price holidays. This is regrettable, as it happens at the moment to be the scene of one of the most elaborate practical jokes in Western Europe.
The last time I crossed the Brenner was nine years ago, when I was hitch-hiking from Munich to Venice and had the good fortune to be given a lift by two international crooks —smugglers of some kind—who drove at such speed round. the romantic gorges, loud with waterfalls, and through the flowery alpine meadows, mellow with the clank of cowbells, that they were stopped for speeding three times by three separate policemen on the way up. Perhaps because the man with whom I was originally hitch-hiking was unable, by reason of his shifty and dishonest appearance, to get a lift at all, and had to walk all the way up one side and down the other in a thunderstorm wearing a dark suit and carrying an umbrella, I began in retrospect to idealise the Brenner Pass in my mind, remembering it as a romantic and dramatic mountain speedway, full of banked curves and highly raked slopes, echo- ing to the tortured screaming of skidding tyres and snarling gear-changes. Nothing could have prepared me better for the Austrian govern- ment's current lea d'esprit.
My first reaction, on leaving Innsbruck last week, was disappointment : no little winding mountain road, once travelled by Goethe on his journey to Italy, blocked by gigantic hiss- ing trucks to overtake on dangerous corners with a blare of horns and a blur of horrified faces: instead a huge signboard indicating a dynamic new four-lane motorway, still white with concrete dust, thrusting uncompromisingly into the belly of the mountain in a dark double tunnel, into which small cars were whizzing at a modest. speed. The tunnel itself is short and designed in the modern style with bright neon lighting, and gives way almost at once to a gracefully curving system of bridges and overpasses, carrying the traffic smoothly and at moderate speed through the sunlit alps, high above the picturesque valleys below.
Gradually my resentment at the loss of the old road that had cut through the mountains like a jagged flash of lightning gave way to enjoyment of the new motorway, a mighty monument to man's triumph over his prim- aeval environment. Speed increases over the grandoise span of the Europa Bridge-820 metres long, according to the sign, and 190 metres above the pine forests in the valley —and then decreases considerably as the motorist approaches a little row of new toll- gates some metres further on. The toll collec- tors are merry, red-faced Tyroleans, who collect the twelve shilling toll, push a brightly coloured brochure through the window, and wave each car on its way with a great display of bluff
good nature. The prospectus, which has a glossy coloured photograph of the Europa Bridge on the front, is entitled Dream Highway over the Alps.
It sets out the history of the Brenner Pass from the Stone Age to the present day, and reviews the daunting technical and aesthetic problems to be overcome when building a road through the 'verdant, bloomovcrsowed slopes, against which the motorway harmoniously snuggles itself, as if a titanic gardener had planted it there.' There is also a rather touching piece on the tourist attractions to be found in those villages formerly serving the main road and now left high and dry by the diversion of the stream of affluent motorists. The whole prospectus is further enlivened by little snaps of work in progress, with cranes, scaffolding and half-built concrete pillars.
The public relations expert's most fragrant prose, however, is reserved for an introduction, entitled Needle-ear of the Continent, which
pours contempt on the atrocious conditions existing before the conception of the new motorway :
'The Brenner is in the last Years to a Horror of Motorcardrivers become. At Passheight hourlong Approach-times are necessary, in snailtempo creeps the motorised Worm in both directions to this important Alpineoverpass. Automobilists are befogged by the Dieselfumes of the Longdistancelorries, which, densely closed up, in first Gear the curverich Stretches behind themselves bring. Dragging Clutches, exhausted Brakes, boiling Radiators, the enor- mous additional Drivestuffusage—of the hour- long Waitingtimes not at all to speak— characterised at that time the Journey over the Brenner.'
Looking out on either side at the aesthetically curving motorway drifting noiselessly past at seventy miles an hour, the silent peaks in the blue above, it is hard to believe that such a state of affairs could ever have existed. Then, still not more than a mile or so from the tollgates, brake lights wink ahead, the traflic slows, and then stops.
At first the mood is unconcerned : it is thought there has been an accident beyond the bend in the road fifty yards ahead. Drivers get out of their cars, look at the view, smoke cigarettes and admire each other's caravans and luggage racks. Then a car starts somewhere in front, they get back into their cars, slam doors, and start their engines as well. Half an hour later the traffic has crawled forward fifty yards, and we can sec round a corner of the mountain and into the long valley. A hundred yards ahead the Highway of Dreams stops altogether, and three or four titanic gardeners, reduced to tiny insignificance by the mountain above them, stand idly about with long shovels among a wilderness of roughly ploughed earth and abandoned tractors. The traffic continues: down a rough track off the motorway in single file, and then back into the already congested and despised old road of which we have read so much, a near-stationary cavalcade of metal and winkling brakelights, stretching as far as the end of the valley--perhaps a mile---and for five miles beyond that to the head of the pass. The experience lasts between four and six hours, during which patrons are encouraged to eat picnics--make little expeditions into the surrounding countryside, rejoining their cars a few yards further on. Presumably in August performances will be slightly longer.
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