Among old motels, petrol pumps and deserts, a book reveals anecdotes, memories and legends of the “coast to coast” route, symbol of the journey par excellence. A must read to go on an adventure
A road can be taken out of service. You can erase its number from maps, build highways next to it that make it obsolete. The motels and petrol stations seen in the melancholy paintings of can be condemned to oblivion Edward Hopperthe ramshackle villages. You can do everything, and more, but it is impossible to abolish a myth.
There Route 66which turns one hundred years old in 2026, is an example of this. It does not exist administratively: on 27 June 1985 it was eliminated from the highways, after the Interstates had replaced its functions. Long stretches remain passable, become Historic Route 66.
From the dust of the Midwest to the asphalt of the New Deal
Yet – even if killed by progress – it remains the most famous road in America, the only one whose number is enough to enter a parallel world, rich in stories, landscapes, figures, skies and engines. It ran, Route 66, for just under 4,000 kilometers, from Chicago towards the West: Illinois, Missouri, a handful of miles in Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, finally California. From the waters of Lake Michigan to the Pacific, three time zones. He was born in 1926. It was necessary to connect the Midwest to the West Coast, to make goods and men travel. It wasn’t drawn with a single pencil stroke: Route 66 swallowed up trails, rural roads, parts of the Pontiac Trail, the Ozark Trail and other routes. The number, which has become an imaginative acronym, was born almost by chance.
The journalist Claudio Castellaccia fine connoisseur of American things, long-time correspondent from Los Angeles for glossy Italian periodicals, in the book Route 66. One Hundred Years on the Road 1926-2026 (just released by Odoya) reproduces a telegram from 30 April 1926. Cyrus Avery – one of the fathers of the artery – communicates the agreement reached to the Bureau of public roads: «We will accept Sixty Six instead of Sixty». That is, “We accept Sixty-six instead of Sixty.” A brand was born, a forerunner of territorial marketing. It was the president’s New Deal Franklin Delano Rooseveltin the 1930s, to transform Route 66: thousands of workers worked on the paving, the bridges, the slopes. In 1938 you could finally go from Chicago to the Pacific almost entirely on asphalt.
It wasn’t all gold. In those years, thousands of people left en masse for California, and not for tourism. Route 66 became the route of exodus to escape the drought and find a corner in which to start again, after having left exploited lands exhausted. John Steinbeck he called Mother Road, the Route 66 traveled by refugees, in trucks loaded to capacity.
Shadows along the Mother Road: exodus and segregation
She is a protagonist of the great novel Furore, later also an unforgettable film by John Ford. Tourists who travel along sections of it today should not forget: the road also has poverty, suffering, exploitation and discrimination in its DNA. In its golden years, it was still in force in much of the United States racial segregation. A black motorist could not take for granted that he would find a motel, a fast food restaurant, even a petrol station that would refuel his car. So much so that since 1936 the Negro Motorist Green Book it showed African Americans the (rare) places in which to stop without taking risks.
Then came the war. The Southwest became a strategic area and the armored forces trained in the Mojave Desert George Pattonthe steel general. The road served, once again, to move America. But sunset was approaching.
The president Dwight Eisenhower he had seen the efficiency of the German Autobahns so, in 1956, he started the colossal Interstate Highway System. Progress does not give discounts.
The decline of Amboy and the birth of pop iconography
One of the most beautiful stories told by Castellacci is that of Amboy. Born at the end of the nineteenth century as a railway station, Route 66 had given it a second life. There was Roy’s Motel & Cafe, the gas station, the post office, houses, workshops. When Interstate 40 was built a few miles north, traffic disappeared, and Amboy with it. In 1989 the small town (bastard place, Guccini would have sung) was sold en bloc, as we do with farmhouses. Route 66, a crucial backdrop to many films (for example Easy Rider and Bagdad Café) also has a soundtrack, composed in 1946 by Bobby Troup: is Get Your Kicks on Route 66, made famous by Nat King Cole. On its kilometers of asphalt the gigantism of street signs was born: enormous fiberglass animals, crooked towers, bright motels. Attractions, traps to stop the motorized traveller, a parade of fascinating horrors which for Gillo Dorfles would have been a matter of careful study.
A road full of glory but which had become useless, could only become tourist destination. A bit like, despite the differences, our Camino de Santiago. Associations have saved old tracts, service stations, motels. Even rust has value on Route 66. Which attracts travelers from all over the world: Americans, Asians, Europeans. Individuals or in groups, nostalgic for an unlived era.
The ritual of the slow journey towards the Ocean
The centenary is one more reason to take a selfie on the straights or curves of the 66. September and autumn are the most pleasant periods to tackle it. The road crosses different territories so that we can talk about a single climate: Illinois is not the Mojave, Flagstaff is not Amarillo. But after the peaks of summer – when Arizona, inland California, New Mexico and Texas become furnaces – autumn allows you to travel slowly, abandoning yourself to the rituals of the tourist (we were about to write pilgrim). That is, stopping, going outside the edges, photographing a sign, exploring an abandoned town.
In New Mexico neon lights survive Tucumcari; in Albuquerque the 66 crosses the city along Central Avenue; in Arizona you encounter the (slightly fake) touristy Old West of Oatman and pass close to the most spectacular landscapes in America. In California, the land of milk and honey, the final race remains Pacific. The exact point where the road ends is the subject of tourist discussions and reinventions. Right so. A route that has become legend does not need cadastral precision, traveling along it means wasting time, the greatest luxury one can afford.
