It was September 5, 1908 when a Turin woman, Emma Strada, 24 years old with the registration number 36, became the first engineer of Italy.
Born in 1884, daughter of an artist, her father was a civil engineer with his own studio in the city, she enrolled at the Royal Polytechnic, which once had its headquarters in Valentino, after obtaining her high school diploma at the Massimo D’Azeglio school.
In Italy, women were admitted to university only in 1874 and the first woman ever to graduate, in medicine, was Ernestina Paper, who was followed by others in the faculties of literature or law, but up until that moment no one had ventured into the male world of engineering.
The daring Emma ranked third out of 62 students (61 men) obtaining the highest marks and, after the discussion of her thesis, the council chamber took more than an hour to decide whether the title should be “engineer” or “female engineer”.
The media of the time were also interested in her, such as La Stampa, which proudly wrote: “Emma Strada, last Saturday, at our Istituto Superiore Politecnico graduated with honors in civil engineering. Miss Strada is thus the first female engineer in Italy and she has only two or three other colleagues abroad”.
Emma worked as an assistant at the University until her father’s death and subsequently worked in her late father’s office together with her brother (also an engineer), and was involved in the construction of aqueducts, tunnels, mines; she could not sign the documents because she was not registered in the Register, but she went regularly and willingly to the construction sites.
The first project of the engineer Emma Strada was the construction of an access tunnel to a mine in Ollomont in the Aosta Valley. She also designed the Catanzaro funicular railway and built the Calabrian branch of the Apulian aqueduct. To promote women’s work in the field of science and technology, in 1957 she founded with other colleagues the Italian Association of Women Engineers and Architects (AIDIA), of which she became the first president.
Emma Strada was a fervent monarchist and for many years spent her mornings at the headquarters of the Turin Monarchist Association as an organizer and animator. She was very close to King Umberto II, in exile at the time, who in turn appreciated and esteemed her and awarded her important Savoy honors.
She was the architect of her dream and her ambitions, but also a courageous woman who demolished the stereotype according to which women could not access the many worlds then dedicated only to men, such as engineering. Thanks also to her and her determination, nowadays being a female engineer is no longer news.
MARIA THE BARBERA
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