Rassegna storica del Risorgimento

Banche e ferrovie in Piemonte
169
of methods to assist in the financing of the most important and difficult lines.25)
Cavour gavé top priority to building the line which ran from Paris through Turin to Milan. To this end the government encouraged the foranation in 1852 of two companies to build lines from Susa, at the foot of the Alps, to Turin and from Turin through Novara to the Lombard frontier on the most direct route to Milan. The state provided half of the capital for the Susa road, guaranteed a return of 4.5 percent on the company's shares, and undertook to operate the road in exchange for 50 percent of its gross revenues. The state took one-quarter of the Novara line's shares and got locai governments to provide another quarter of the capital.26) The technique employed assured the companies of sufficient capital to get started quickly, while making it easy for the state to divest itself of its investment by selling its shares once the roads had been completed and a locai market for rail shares had been solddly established.
While the Susa and Novara roads were successfully obtaim'ng parlia-mentary approvai, Cavour and Paleocapa published a detailed pian for a comprehensive rail system in Savoy, which would rie the kingdom's budding railroad network to Paris, Lyon and Geneva. By 1853, thanks in large measure to Cavour's personal contacts with French Swiss, and Italian proponents of the Parisian haute banque, a gigantic new French company, the Compagnia Vittorio Emanuele, had been put together to undertake the project. With Cavour's energetic support, it too quickly received parlia-mentary approvai, despite the burden of a state guarantee of a 45 percent return on the company's shares.27)
The final step in the fulfilhnerjit of the pian to connect Turin to Paris was the most difficult to realize, because the railroad technology of the day was not up to the challenge of crossing over or tunneling through the Alps. The government of Charles Albert had already surveyed the route and Cavour and. Paleocapa commissioned new studies by the state's engineers and by those of the Compagnia Vittorio Emanuele, which was pledged to join its efforts to those of the state in seeking to conquer the Alpine barrier. The Turin government also launched a competition to find a way of tunneling through the Alps and by 1855 a three-man team of state engineers was working full-time on the project, developing a combination of ideas which, by 1857, was considered fully practicable. Cavour then put together a proposai which speedily received parliamentary approvai. The state undertook to construct the entire tunnel route, including
25) Howell, PP. 86-88, 92-96, 130n47, 157-160.
26) Cavour, Sfrìtti, pp. 229-230; Romeo, 2:511-516; and AP, 26:434460 and 27:757-798.
27) AP, 28:1712-1714, 49:1111; Bertrand Gillo, Los investissements frangais en Italie (1815-1914) (Turin, 1968), pp. 151-155; Cameron, France, 236-237; and Howell, pp. 94-95.