Evolutio: 120 years of Italian progress through major infrastructure projects

A title that captures the spirit of a journey: Evolutio. With this word, Webuild has chosen to tell the story of the role that infrastructures have played – and continue to play – in the evolution of peoples and nations.

Open to the public from October 8 to November 9, 2025, at the Museum of the Ara Pacis Museum in Rome, the Exhibition “Evolutio – Building the future for the last 120 years” narrates 120 years of Italian progress through major infrastructure projects.

Italy, a protagonist of over a century of profound transformation, reflects itself in its infrastructure development: dams, railways, metro systems, bridges, motorways, stadiums. Structures that are far more than concrete and steel, but which have marked decisive moments in the nation’s history, accompanying it from the agricultural backwardness of the early twentieth century into the globalised and interconnected world of today.

Evolutio, therefore, is not only an Exhibition: it is a broader cultural project that includes also a Digital Museum, uniting the memory of the past with a vision of the future through infrastructure construction, thanks to the vast Webuild Group archive, which contains around 1.5 million photos and videos.

The immersive and interactive Exhibition unfolds across six thematic rooms that guide visitors on a journey through the last century and the first decades of the new millennium.

The five chronological sections – spanning from the 1930s to the present day – are enhanced by images, videos, and photographs that follow two main narrative themes: “the Days,” to illustrate how people lived in each era, and “the Works,” to show Italy’s evolution through its infrastructure. This division is inspired by the ancient Greek poem Works and Days by Hesiod, which focuses on labor and daily life.

It begins with the roots: an Italy poor in infrastructure, where electrification and the first great dams became symbols of necessary modernisation. The path then moves to water, the country’s “white coal”, which provided energy, irrigation and life.

Next come the rooms dedicated to urban mobility, with metro systems that transformed the face of cities, followed by those on civic buildings and urban infrastructure development – a mirror of a society growing in prosperity and culture.

Finally, the great arteries of connection: motorways, bridges and high-speed rail lines, works that united territories and shortened distances, redrawing the social and economic geography of the country.

The Exhibition also looks beyond national borders: Italian companies, now part of the Webuild Group, have taken their expertise abroad, building complex works all over the world and exporting high-value Made in Italy.

Approximately 200 historical and contemporary images, dozens of videos – from the Webuild archive – and multimedia installations offer visitors not only a technical account, but also an emotional journey through eras and collective memories.

A section is dedicated to the “hidden heroes”, those who built the works on display with their own hands. Men and women who dug tunnels, lifted steel, spent weeks in hyperbaric chambers or on remote construction sites in the mountains. Fundamental figures who turned the projects of visionary men into reality.

The hall restores their faces and stories through historical images, accounts and testimonies. From here the journey arrives in the present and projects into the future, with the Strait of Messina Bridge presented via a multimedia installation that soars high within the museum space, metaphorically joining with the Ara Pacis of Augustus, which is housed in the dedicated Museum.

The Evolutio Exhibition takes place within the Ara Pacis Museum in Rome, a symbolic venue.

The altar commissioned by Augustus in 9 BC to celebrate peace and prosperity in the Empire embodies the very idea of progress as construction rather than conquest. Exhibiting here means placing the story of Evolutio in a symbolic space, where past and present are in dialogue.

The luminous, modern Richard Meier’s architecture, which shelters the altar, thus becomes the ideal container for a narrative weaving together history and vision.

Evolutio is another milestone in the path Webuild Group has pursued for years: investing in the promotion of culture in Italy and worldwide, while also looking at international best practices. The Evolutio Exhibition, highlights the role of infrastructure and its impact on culture and society.

Infrastructures thus become custodians of memory and interpreters of the future. Great works are never only feats of engineering, but stories of communities, expressions of political vision, and acts of civic commitment – just as the Evolutio Exhibition offers the public a key to understanding past history and imagining the future.