The history of Ponte Vecchio

written by Ilaria Gelichi


Ponte Vecchio is one of the most famous bridges in the world and a symbol of the city of Florence. It crosses the river Arno in its narrowest part, where anciently there was a ford. During the Roman age and early Middle Ages many bridges were built and destroyed by floods, especially by the famous flood of 1333, one of the most violent. The bridge was then rebuilt with 3 arches in 1345, probably by Taddeo Gaddi or Neri di Fioravante.

As was once common Ponte Vecchio still has shops built on it, but in the past there were no jewellers. In 1442 the authorities of the city stated that all butchers should move their shops on the bridge. The purpose of this regulation was keeping the city’s streets clean and remove the butchers from the city centre, keeping them away from palaces and homes. They in fact used to throw discards and offal in the river Arno and the street they used to reach it were dirty and stinky; in this way they could throw them directly into the river without soiling the city.

In 1565 the architect Giorgio Vasari built the famous “corridoio vasariano” (Vasari’s corridor) to link Palazzo Vecchio, the political and administrative centre, to Palazzo Pitti, the Medici’s private palace. This corridor is almost 1 kilometre long (0,62 miles) and passes over the shops of Ponte Vecchio. For this reason, in 1593 Ferdinando I of the Medici family stated that all butchers should stop selling there and move from the bridge – he did not like this smelly activity under his corridor. He then replaced the butchers with gold merchants and jewellers, as we can still see nowadays.

Ponte Vecchio is the only bridge in Florence which was not destroyed by Germans during their retreat at the end of World War II. According to some sources, this happened because of an express order by Hitler (who had visited Florence and the bridge before the war) and with the help of Gerhard Wolf, the German representative in Florence. For this reason and for other merits he obtained the honorary citizenship of the city of Florence; a plate with his name was also put on the bridge.

Athens and Florence: the Foundational Relation of Western Culture

Piazza della Signoria shines in the sun of June. The severe solidity of Palazzo Vecchio, the graceful and spacious arches of the Loggia de' Lanzi, the crowd of classical and Renaissance statues staring at the passersby with their eloquently silent gaze- all this conjures up a sense of harmony, lightness and luminosity as one could find only on the Acropolis, when the summer sun and its reflections on the Aegean immerse the Parthenon and the temple of Poseidon in a bath of light. Florence as the new Athens: the proofs of this equation are under the very eyes of the one who looks at the city on the Arno through that idea of beauty first incarnated on Greek soil. One would have no difficulty thinking that Plato would have found himself at ease under the porch of the Uffizi or strolling along the benches of the Arno: he would have admired here that same sense of equilibrium and profoundly discrete beauty that nourished his soul in his native Attica, where he spent his days walking out and about with Socrates through the Stoá Poekíle and the Agorá. We know for sure that his alleged reincarnation -if we want to agree with Cardinal Bessarion- enjoyed Florence very much. Georgios Gemistós, called the Plethon, lived here for four years during the period of the Council of Ferrara and Florenze (1437-39), teaching at the Studium on the differences between Aristotle and Plato and reintroducing to the West the texts of the latter. He was among those Greek scholars and prelates who came as the delegation from the fading Byzantine Empire to discuss the re-unification of the Eastern and Western churches. When he arrived, the power of the Medici had just begun and Florence was not yet very far from the violence and austerity of its Middle Ages. The city was not yet adorned with statues purposefully remindful of Classical Antiquity and the dome of Brunelleschi had still to gentrify the fierce skyline formed by the multitude of spear-like towers. Born in Greece and raised on the texts of divine Plato, Plethon is among those, who bringing Platonism back to the West contributed immensely to giving Umanesimo its form. Benozzo Gozzoli represented him in the center of his fresco in the Cappella de' Magi: the philosopher stands side by side to the artist, as if the latter wanted to underline a spiritual offspring from the former. Plethon stands out from the middle of the crowd for his intense look and his penetrating eyes that provoke the observer. He was indeed a father-like figure to many geniuses who populated that period: Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, Poliziano, Lorenzo il Magnifico, Botticelli, Piero della Francesca, Michelangelo all fed and debated (sometimes harshly) on the rediscovered words of Plato and Plotinus, Proclus and Damascius opened up to them by Plethon: from this fermentation the idea of homo copula mundi finally came out as an unshakable cornerstone, on which Europe and the Western world founded its astonishing development. Maybe there is no more powerful symbol of this new spirit and its view on man and the world than Michelangelo's David: a miracle of beauty, balance and nobility incarnated in the decisive and strong gaze of a young boy, who stands in front of Palazzo Vecchio as an image of the daring attitude of this new Athens that is Florence. Constantinople was then agonizing, the whole of Greece was already under foreign yoke: yet, in its ultimate struggle the Greek world gave us its most delicate and fruitful flower. Without Greece there would have been no Renaissance, no Michelangelo, no Ficino, no Botticelli. Maybe, it is worth keeping this in mind, in this period in which Greece seems again caught in an agonizing struggle.