Ponte Rotto: Ancient Rome's Bridge to Nowhere

[guy]

Good article:
 

The Ponte Rotto still stands as a heroic fragment, a single arch cut off from both banks 

 

 

Visitors to the Eternal City invariably marvel at the Pantheon and other glories of Roman Imperial architecture. But an earlier structure, the Ponte Rotto, or Broken Bridge, represents at least as great a feat of building.

Constructed in 179 B.C., it is Rome's oldest bridge and one of the few surviving examples of Roman Republican architecture. It linked the cattle market, the Forum Boarium on the eastern bank, with Trastevere on the western one.

http://online.wsj.com/articles/masterpiece-ponte-rotto-in-rome-1409959743
 
 
guy also known as gaius

Edited September 6, 2014 by guy

[Aurelia]

Very interesting, thanks for posting. I may have missed this bridge last time I was in Rome.

 

But for me, the Ponte Rotto still stands as a heroic fragment, enduring and ultimately defeated by the onslaughts of the raging Tiber floods and the many invasions Rome experienced. But its cruelest defeat was in modern times, when two of its remaining piers and a single arch were demolished to build a modern iron trestle bridge so close to the remnant of the Pons Aemilius that it can no longer be seen and contemplated in isolation. Now it stands, a single arch cut off from both banks, a bridge that no one can reach, no one can walk upon.

 

Sad that it survived more or less intact for centuries, only to be vandalised in "modern" times.