Description
The Ponte Santa Trinita is the bridge over the Arno that links Via de' Tornabuoni, in the center of Florence, with the Oltrarno. Guidebooks have praised it for centuries for its elegance: three arches with a taut, light curve, built of pietra forte, a few steps from the Ponte Vecchio.
What sets it apart is its shape: the arches are not semicircular but catenary, like a chain hung from both ends and turned upside down. Bartolomeo Ammannati's solution, inspired by Michelangelo, made the bridge sturdier and allowed the spans to be widened without arching the roadway.
The piers too have a studied shape: a section with sharp angles, so that tree trunks and debris in a flood would catch less and not block the arches. On the keystones of the arches, large marble cartouches record the undertaking and the date, 1569.
At the ends stand the statues of the Four Seasons, which arrived in 1608 for the wedding of Cosimo II. The bridge has been considered a national artistic heritage since the 1901 list, together with the Ponte Vecchio.
This is a bridge with many collapses behind it. The first, of wood, commissioned by Lamberto de' Frescobaldi in 1252, was swept away by a flood in 1269. The stone one gave way in the great flood of 1333, the next in the flood of 1557.
Then Cosimo I called in Bartolomeo Ammannati, with a mysterious consultation from Michelangelo. The work lasted from 1567 to 1570, and out of it came today's bridge, built to give unity to the axis between Via Tornabuoni and Via Maggio.
“Who has seen this woman?” In 1958 leaflets and newspapers all over the world were looking for a marble head: that of Primavera, one of the statues, which vanished when the Germans blew up the bridge in 1944. Whoever found it would get 3,000 dollars.
People thought it was a theft. In reality the head had never left the Arno: a sand dredger fished it out in 1961, a few dozen meters downstream. Florence chose to rebuild the bridge “as it was and where it was”, recovering the stones from the river. It reopened in 1958.
What sets it apart is its shape: the arches are not semicircular but catenary, like a chain hung from both ends and turned upside down. Bartolomeo Ammannati's solution, inspired by Michelangelo, made the bridge sturdier and allowed the spans to be widened without arching the roadway.
The piers too have a studied shape: a section with sharp angles, so that tree trunks and debris in a flood would catch less and not block the arches. On the keystones of the arches, large marble cartouches record the undertaking and the date, 1569.
At the ends stand the statues of the Four Seasons, which arrived in 1608 for the wedding of Cosimo II. The bridge has been considered a national artistic heritage since the 1901 list, together with the Ponte Vecchio.
This is a bridge with many collapses behind it. The first, of wood, commissioned by Lamberto de' Frescobaldi in 1252, was swept away by a flood in 1269. The stone one gave way in the great flood of 1333, the next in the flood of 1557.
Then Cosimo I called in Bartolomeo Ammannati, with a mysterious consultation from Michelangelo. The work lasted from 1567 to 1570, and out of it came today's bridge, built to give unity to the axis between Via Tornabuoni and Via Maggio.
“Who has seen this woman?” In 1958 leaflets and newspapers all over the world were looking for a marble head: that of Primavera, one of the statues, which vanished when the Germans blew up the bridge in 1944. Whoever found it would get 3,000 dollars.
People thought it was a theft. In reality the head had never left the Arno: a sand dredger fished it out in 1961, a few dozen meters downstream. Florence chose to rebuild the bridge “as it was and where it was”, recovering the stones from the river. It reopened in 1958.