Gaetano Ciocca (1882-1966) was an engineer from Garlasco volunteer in the Great War, when he developed the idea of the guided road. At the foot of the mountains of the front, it realized that the transfordation operations of weapons and materials between the railway and the trenches were a weak point of the logistics chain. The tortuous roads, the need to move large quantities of load from the wagons to the lenses and not very capacious trucks constituted a bottle cap that heavily influenced the offensive skills of the Italians.
After the war, Ciocca matured the project that would allow to eliminate these problems. Of relatively simple construction, the guided road or Guidovia consisted in a hybrid system between railway and ordinary road. A concrete track with a single guide to the center, to which two rubber wheels connected to the front axis of a truck that could carry more trailers were anchored. Designed to have limited corner curves, the guided road cost much less than the railway, both in terms of realization and maintenance and was very quick to build. The Ciocca project saw great interest from the fascist government, which thought of its application especially in the colonies, where infrastructure works and difficult soil would have significantly weighed on the state budget. The invention of Ciocca took shape in the second half of the 1930s. In Pavia a circular section of 28 meters of radius was laid where for the first time a truck passed through. But it was in 1937 that the guided road saw the light on an experimental basis in Rome in the current Montespaccato district. Here the concrete track of the width of 2.70 meters with the 66 cm thick guide was laid with curves, exchanges and bridges in the ground granted by the Marquis Fogaccia, president of the concrete industrialists. On December 15, 1937, the experimental guided road entered the function of Mussolini and the authorities, who saw a convoy towed by a Fiat 634 truck hooking to the concrete track by driving numerous trailer wagons. The dream of Ciocca, an eclectic engineer who in the post -war period will dedicate himself to the urban development of the reconstruction, will however be destined to vanish for the events that affected the Italian colonies of Africa. In 1941 the last colony, Eritrea, was lost and the guided road never saw the light. A similar system, but which used railway vehicles on a tire, was built at the Sanctuary of the Madonna della Guardia at Genoa and operated from 1929 to 1967. It was a precursor system of some modern metropolitan lines on rubberized wheels.
