Ponte Vecchio
Ponte Vecchio Firenze
... in sul passo d’Arno
(Inferno XIII.146)
... on the pass over the Arno
This plaque is located in the loggetta beneath the Vasari Corridor at the center of Ponte Vecchio. Although Dante mentions the Arno numerous times, he only refers to this bridge twice in his entire corpus: once, as here, in Inferno’s wood of the suicides and once again in Cacciaguida’s speech in Paradiso (16.146). In both instances, he refers to the statue of Mars, which used to stand at the north end of this bridge.
In fact, this tercet begins by reminding the reader that Mars, indignant at having lost his place (to Saint John the Baptist) as patron of Florence, “shall always make the city weep with his art.” The statue of Mars was washed away by the flooding of the Arno in 1333.
Not far from this plaque is another that commemorates the same massive flood (above). It is written in Gothic script, and accompanied by a statuette depicting a young putto (Cupid figure). The inscription is original, but the figurine is rather newer. It reads as follows.
anno milleno ter centum ter quoque deno
et tribus adiunttis in quarta luce novembris
turbine limpharum multarum corruit hic pons
postea millenis ter centum quinque novenis
pulcrior ornatus factus fuit et renovatus,
hic puer ostendit breviter que facta fuerunt.
In the year one thousand three hundred thirty and three, on the fourth day of November, this bridge collapsed into the churning flow of heavy rains. Afterwards, in one thousand three hundred and fifty-nine, it was reconstructed and made even more beautiful. This boy points out, in short, what was done.
Despite the longevity of a legend that maintains Dante first saw Beatrice on this bridge, nothing like that is ever mentioned by Dante himself. It could well have been the Romantics and the pre-Raphaelites who started and perpetuated the myth.
Above: Henry Holiday, Beatrice and Dante (1882-84). Holiday here represents a meeting of the two lovers based loosely on the Vita nova. Ponte Vecchio is visible in the background.
Beginning in 1422, Ponte Vecchio began hosting butcher shops because their work was so malodorous and often disgusting that no one wanted them in their own neighborhood. From the bridge, the beccai (butchers) could simply toss the undesirable bits directly into the river. It was not until about 1593 that they were again chased out, this time in favor of the goldsmiths whose wares you see today, by Grand Duke Ferdinando I de’ Medici who could not endure the smells wafting into town from the bridge. For centuries, only the renaioli (workers who dug up sand and sold it on the river’s banks as construction material) spent time beneath bridges, but, after the goldsmiths arrived, the area beneath Ponte Vecchio became quite crowded as people believed they could find discarded gold in the water under the jewelry shops. The city eventually banned the practice for obvious reasons.
Perhaps it’s not a coincidence that the destruction threatened by Mars continued into the twentieth century. The Nazis ordered the elimination of all the bridges across the Arno upon their retreat northward in 1944, but Gerhard Wolf refused to demolish this one. Instead, he destroyed the buildings on each of its ends, making it unusable but preserving it for future generations. Below: a B-26 flies over Ponte Vecchio in 1945.
The plaque to the right of Dante’s mention of the Arno is dedicated to the man who refused to take out this bridge. It reads: “Gerhard Wolf (1896-1971), German consul born in Dresden, which in turn became Florence’s sister city, played a decisive role in saving Ponte Vecchio (1944) from the barbarity of the Second World War and was instrumental in the release of Jewish and political prisoners in the crucial phase of Nazi occupation.”