Rialto Bridge Italy

Legendary

The oldest bridge spanning the Grand Canal, shops were added in the 15th century to pay for its maintenance.

Photo by gnuckx

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In 1444, a crowd packed onto this bridge to watch a boat parade for a nobleman's wedding. The bridge gave way under their weight and dumped everyone into the Grand Canal.

Venice rebuilt it. Eighty years later, it collapsed again.

The first bridge on this spot was built in 1181 by an engineer named Nicolò Barattieri. It was a pontoon bridge, a row of boats tied together with a walkway on top, and it was the first crossing over the Grand Canal anywhere in the city.

People called it the Ponte della Moneta, because it led to the mint where Venice made its coins. As the Rialto market grew beside it, the name changed to Rialto Bridge.

The pontoon wore out fast under all the foot traffic, so around 1255 Venice replaced it with a wooden bridge. That one had a section in the middle that lifted so tall ships could pass through.

Wood turned out to be a problem. The bridge burned during a revolt in 1310, fell in 1444, and fell again in 1524.

The city decided it needed stone. In 1551 it asked for designs, and some of the most famous architects in Italy answered, including Michelangelo and Andrea Palladio.

They all proposed bridges with several arches. Venice rejected every one, because the extra columns would block boats on the canal.

The winner was a Venetian engineer named Antonio da Ponte, whose last name means "of the Bridge." He proposed a single stone arch leaping the whole canal, and plenty of people said it would never stand. 

Construction ran from 1588 to 1591. The arch rises 7.5 meters above the water, and to hold it up, workers drove about 12,000 wooden posts into the mud beneath the canal.

It's still standing more than 430 years later. It was the only way to walk across the Grand Canal until 1854.

Cross the bridge on the middle walkway, between the two rows of shops that have sold jewelry and glass since the 1500s. Stop at the top and look down the Grand Canal in both directions, with gondolas and water buses passing under your feet. Then step down to the Rialto market on the San Polo side, where fishmongers have been trading for 900 years.