Zero low-cost and no high-speed rail: Alitalia's incredible web in Italian skies 50 years ago

The Alitalia of the 1970s was not only a global long-haul airline.

At a time when high-speed trains were only in the dreams of a few visionary engineers and when low-cost airlines were nowhere to be seen (the first, Ryanair, would be seen some fifteen years later), the national airline had as its only (modest) competitors Itavia, which would later be 'sunk' by the 1980 Ustica tragedy, and Alisarda (but only on flights between the 'mainland' and Sardinia).

And, accordingly, literally dominated the Italian skies, with a dense network of north-south as well as east-west connections.

Airbus had just introduced the first A300s into service with Air France; to see the A320 would take another two decades and the fleet of Alitalia and its subsidiary ATI (Aero Trasporti Italiani) for domestic routes was all 'Made in USA', consisting of Douglas DC9-30s and Boeing 727-200s.

Looking at a map of the Italian network reported in an in-flight magazine from the middle of that decade, one thing that is striking is that Milan is referred to simply as 'Milan,' without any distinction between Linate and Malpensa because, as it would have been until 1998 (when Malpensa for ten years became the flag carrier's main hub), 'Milan' was Linate, while from Malpensa it operated only a few scattered intercontinental connections.

But the element that jumps out most is the network of 'cross' connections, that is, those that had neither Rome nor Milan as their starting or ending point.

Looking at the map you can find direct flights to Alghero from Genoa, Turin, Pisa, Bologna and Cagliari; for Cagliari from Naples and Palermo; for Catania from Naples and Reggio Calabria; for Palermo (in addition to Cagliari) from Pisa, Naples, Trapani, Pantelleria and Lampedusa; for Naples from Bologna, but curiously not from Rome despite the absence of high-speed rail; also from Naples, the absence of a connection to Reggio Calabria is surprising, despite the Third World conditions of the Naples highway being easily imaginable. Reggio (or the sections that already existed).

In the north, there were a Milan-Genoa, a Milan-Venice (today by train it takes just over two hours), a Milan-Trieste and a Verona-Pisa.

A veritable spider's web that actually still exists in part today, woven year after year by low-cost airlines that sensed the potential of point-to-point flights on secondary domestic routes, while the Alitalia of recent times and ITA Airways of today focused exclusively on operations from their two hubs in Rome Fiumicino and Milan Linate.