Ponte Pietra Historical Timeline

Reading this bridge from one bank to the other is a lesson in what survives and what gets rebuilt. Its five arches are unequal because each was repaired at a different date by people solving the immediate problem, and the difference in masonry is visible from fifty metres away.

Chronology

1. 100 B.C. The bridge is completed. It carried the road out of the Roman town toward the hill opposite, and the crossing has been in the same place ever since — which is why the street pattern on both banks still converges on it.
2. 1298 Alberto I della Scala rebuilds the arch nearest the right bank. Scaliger brickwork against Roman stone, in the same structure: the clearest single join on the bridge.
3. 1945 Retreating German troops blow up four of the five arches. Only the Roman work at the far end comes through intact.
4. 1957 Rebuilt using the original materials, recovered from the riverbed. The bridge is therefore simultaneously an ancient structure and a post-war reconstruction, and neither description is wrong.

Two techniques, one structure

The Roman arches are built of large squared blocks of white stone laid without mortar, held by their own weight and the precision of the cut. The medieval arches are brick over a rubble core — a cheaper, faster method better suited to a river that kept taking the bridge away.

The 1957 reconstruction was done by recovering original material, identifying where each piece belonged and putting it back, with new work distinguishable from old. That is why the bridge reads as repaired rather than replaced.

• Official website
• Wikipedia