Italian engineers working from the tiny alpine village of Entreves in the Aosta Valley, are already about one third of the way along their section of the projected seven and a half mile roadway through Europe's highest mountain...Mont Blanc.

Blasting and drilling their way towards French engineers working from Les Pelerins, near Chamonix, plans have allowed them only half an inch in error of direction.

When completed in nineteen sixty-one, the twenty million pound longest underground thoroughfare in the world, will provide a vital all-the-year-round link between north-west Europe and Italy.

Financed jointly by Franco-Swiss-Italian concerns it is expected that six hundred vehicles will pass hourly through the thirty six feet wide-sixteen feet high main tunnel. Two small subsidiary tunnels will provide ventilation.

Large niches every one thousand feet will permit stalled vehicles to be parked without stemming the expected flow of traffic.

The completed tunnel will cut two hundred and thirty two kilometres off the present road journey between Paris and Rome, and three hundred and thirteen kilometres between Paris and Milan..through the ingenuity of man the world becomes a smaller place.