Abstracts of the article “, a bridge that spans centuries” Written by Jay Pridmore On The Wall Street Journal, June 26th 2010

“This marvel of medieval construction provides a lens on ’s layered history”

“Ponte Vecchio’s inimitable architecture begins with three graceful masonry spans— long, low and a marvel of medieval construction. Above these sit the famous gold and jewelry shops, crowded along the carriageway and cantilevered asymmetrically— chaotically—over the river. Above one side runs the , built in the late Renaissance with all the artistic and political bravado of the Medici rulers who commissioned it”. (…)

“No one can say absolutely why Ponte Vecchio touches the spirit the way it does. Why, for instance, did the panorama that the structure dominates liberate the protagonist Lucy Honeychurch Bartlett in ‘A Room With a View’, E.M. Forster’s novel and later a feature film?”. (...)

“Perhaps it’s because Ponte Vecchio’s architecture of countless fragments reflects this city’s incalculable memory or, more simply, its lovely imperfections touch deep emotions. In fact, the construction we see today is far from the first to grace the site. For some 2,000 years the central bridge of Florence has crossed this narrow point in the —at least since 59 B.C. when Romans settled the untamed floodplain that became a colony called Florentia. Engineers, Rome’s true conquerors, laid out the city, drained the marshes and built a bridge with stone piers. As intended, Florence became the crucial link between the north and south of ”. (…)

“No matter whose work, Ponte Vecchio represented an astounding technical feat for its time. The real mystery of the bridge lies in how its builders had the knowledge to design three segmental arches—each less than a semicircle in depth—long enough to allow maximum water to pass underneath and low enough to give the paved surface its comfortable gradient. They were almost certainly the longest such spans in Europe at the time and perhaps the first segmental arches on the continent since Roman times. The precise proportions of this technology would not even be written down for another hundred years; at this point the only other bridge known to be using a segmental arch was the An Ji Bridge in Hebei, China, which raises the intriguing question of whether Chinese-Florentine trade brought this touch of engineering knowledge to Italy along with silk and spices”. (...)

“Florence remains a city of large buildings like the Duomo and the , which fill guidebooks and dissertations. But visitors, not to mention poets and artists, also love the delicate sensations linking the city’s past to the present. In ‘Mornings in Florence’ John Ruskin counsels to look deeper than the lively shops that populate Ponte Vecchio and inspect its masonry. ‘The old stones of it’, he marveled in 1877, ‘are unshaken to this day’”. (…)