Bridge on the Arno

"The most beautiful bridge in the world," Florentines called it, and they never got over their outrage when, in 1944, the retreating Nazis blew up the Ponte Santa Trinita, along with four other bridges across the Arno. (Only the Ponte Vecchio was spared, because it was considered too fragile to be useful for Allied military vehicles.) Designed by

Michelangelo and built by famed Architect Bartolomeo Ammannati in 1569, the "bridge of the beautiful curve" had enchanted generations of Florentines with its unobtrusive elegance, its "mysterious arches" that followed no known geometric curve or architectural formula. "Away from Florence," said famed Art Historian Bernard Berenson, "this was always the image which came to my mind."

A month after Santa Trinita's destruction Architect Luigi Bellini surveyed the ruins jutting like stumps from the Arno's muddy waters, vowed, "We shall have a new bridge--where it was, and as it was." A citizens' committee headed by Berenson raised $100,000 abroad, Florentines contributed $30,000, the national government added a final $350,000.

The project was entrusted to Riccardo Gizdulich, a blond, cigar-smoking architect who has built some of Italy's most radically modern structures. He studied photographs, the designs left by Ammannati, notes left by the head mason. Under his direction, the Arno was dammed, and the river bottom was searched for fragments left after the explosion. Studying the shards, Gizdulich deduced that the ancient masons had used special chiseling and cutting implements now unknown. Gizdulich designed similar tools and had them made by hand, taught a group of artisans to use them. The pieces of the old bridge were lovingly fitted and pieced out with new stone taken from the same Boboli Gardens quarry that Ammannati had employed. Architect Gizdulich grew so familiar with the ancient plans that he could even detect errors in Ammannati's work. But he concluded they were "adorable errors," and carefully preserved them. Workers pieced together fragments of the four statues of the seasons from the river bed, placed them in their old positions on the four corners of the 110-yd.-long span.

One day last week Italian Premier Adone Zoli went up to Florence on a ceremonial visit, and the city's church bells tolled all day. Three years abuilding, the Ponte Santa Trinita was formally inaugurated. The head of the statue of Spring was missing (some Florentines claim an Allied soldier took it), but Florentines contentedly examined the swirl of water under the arches and pronounced it just the same. To those who objected that "after all, the bridge is only a full-scale model of the original," Gizdulich replied: "Even though orchestras are not the same as they were then, we still play the works of Beethoven. I think we should go on playing them."

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