From the Gotthard road to the forwarding houses of Chiasso

Transit as a physical trade

For most of its history the territory of today's Ticino lived from transit in the physical sense: from the carriage, storage, taxation and sale of goods that crossed the Alps between Lombardy and the Swiss plateau. Chapter A.IV has described the porters' corporations of the Leventina, the Susten (public warehouses), the tolls and the fairs, the trade in grain, salt, cattle, cheese and wine, and the smuggling that accompanied every border regime. The Historical Lexicon describes the October livestock fair of Lugano, which brought animals from central and eastern Switzerland and from Austria to buyers from northern Italy, and a city that imported grain, salt and meat from Lombardy.¹ The merchants of this economy were commission agents and brokers who bought and sold for others, forwarders who arranged carriage, and innkeepers and carriers who stored and moved goods. Their business was physical and local. The profit stayed with those who controlled a stage of the road or a warehouse.

The opening of the Gotthard railway in 1882 changed the scale of this economy without changing its nature. Lugano's station, built between 1874 and 1877, placed the city on one of the main connections between northern Italy and central and northern Europe.² The economic historian Bruno Caizzi pointed out that 1882 did not open a phase of true industrialization in Ticino: the canton counted only 1,929 factory workers in that year, while the Italian customs revisions between 1878 and 1887 raised a tariff barrier on the southern side.³ The railway made Ticino a corridor for goods that were produced and consumed elsewhere. It created employment for railwaymen, customs officers and forwarders, but little local processing. This corridor function, with its dependence on goods that belonged to others, is the economic precondition of the later trading business, which also handles goods that never touch the canton.

Chiasso as customs town

The clearest example of the corridor economy is Chiasso. The railway line from Chiasso to Lugano was opened in 1874 and the line to Como in 1876.⁴ The status of Chiasso as an international station rested on a convention signed in Bern on 23 December 1873 and approved by the Federal Assembly on 27 January 1874. The first wooden station building proved inadequate and was replaced by a brick building in 1885. The present main building was inaugurated on 12 April 1932.⁵ Every goods train on the Gotthard route between Switzerland and Italy had to stop at Chiasso for customs clearance. Around the station and the customs offices grew a business of forwarding houses (case di spedizione) and customs agents. The Historical Lexicon lists the forwarding houses together with the international station and the free zone (punto franco), active from 1925, as the institutions that made Chiasso a logistics centre.⁶

The forwarding agent of Chiasso performed functions that the modern trader still needs. He received documents from the sender, organized the onward carriage, cleared the goods through two customs administrations, stored them when necessary and advanced duties and freight charges, which he recovered from the consignee. The legal form of this activity was and remains the forwarding contract (Art. 439 of the Swiss Code of Obligations, CO), which treats the forwarder as a commission agent but applies the rules on the contract of carriage to the forwarding of the goods, and the warehousing contract (Art. 482–486 CO).⁷ The forwarder therefore needed credit, foreign exchange and a bank that understood documentary transactions, and Chapter C.III has shown that the first banks of Chiasso grew out of this commercial need before they became, after the Second World War, institutions for Italian private clients. The skills that this economy developed were the reading of commercial documents, the knowledge of Italian and Swiss customs law, the handling of lira and franc payments and the management of goods owned by third parties.

Notes

1. Giuseppe Negro, "Lugano (comune)", in Dizionario storico della Svizzera (DSS), version of 22 December 2022, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/it/articles/002177/2022-12-22/. ↩
2. Negro, "Lugano" (above). ↩
3. Bruno Caizzi, "Il Ticino prima e dopo il 1882", Scuola ticinese no. 102, https://m4.ti.ch/fileadmin/DECS/DS/Rivista_scuola_ticinese/ST_n.102/ ST_102_Caizzi_prima_e_dopo_1882.pdf (1,929 factory workers in 1882; Italian customs revisions of 1878–1887). ↩
4. Stefania Bianchi, "Chiasso", in DSS, version of 2 May 2005, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/it/articles/002230/2005-05-02/ ("Nel 1874 venne inaugurata la linea C.-Lugano, nel 1876 quella per Como"). ↩
5. La Regione, "Stazione internazionale di Chiasso, 150 anni", 16 February 2024, https://www.laregione.ch/cantone/mendrisiotto/1733861/servizi. ↩
6. Bianchi, "Chiasso" (above) ("case di spedizione"; "punto franco, attivo dal 1925"). ↩
7. Federal Act on the Amendment of the Swiss Civil Code (Part Five: The Code of Obligations) of 30 March 1911, SR 220, Art. 439 (forwarding contract), English text on Lawbrary, https://lawbrary.ch/law/art/OR-v2024.01-en-art-439/print, and Art. 482–486 (warehousing contract, followed in Art. 487 ff. by the liability of innkeepers), on Droit bilingue, https://www.droit-bilingue.ch/en-de/2/22/220-482-696.html and https://www.droit-bilingue.ch/en-de/2/22/220-487-701.html. On the historical background of commission and forwarding see Chapter A.IV. ↩

For general information only. This article does not constitute legal or tax advice, does not replace advice on an individual case and creates no lawyer-client relationship. It reflects the legal position as of October 2026.