The Ponte degli Scalzi or Bridge of the barefoot is, together with the Rialto Bridge, the
Accademia Bridge and the Constitution Bridge, one of the four bridges
that cross the Grand Canal in Venice. The bridge takes its name from the
nearby church of Santa Maria di Nazareth, better known as the Scalzi
church.
The work is called the station or railway bridge due to
the proximity of the Venice Santa Lucia railway station.
A first bridge was built in 1858 by the English engineer Alfred
Neville under Habsburg rule, to improve access to the recently built
railway station. It was a cast iron bridge with a rectilinear structure,
very similar to the one erected a few years earlier by Neville himself
at the Academy.
The limited height (4 meters) prevented the
passage of boats with trees and the openly "industrial" style did not
reconcile aesthetically with the surrounding structures. Cast iron also
began to show signs of structural failure in some points after a few
years, for which the Municipality of Venice was forced in the early
1930s to make a rapid decision regarding its replacement.
The construction of the stone bridge in front of the Venice railway
station is closely linked to those of the station itself and of Piazzale
Roma. The hypothesis of a new bridge which, crossing the Grand Canal in
the place where the Constitution bridge stands today, would put the
railway terminal in communication with the car terminal, however,
quickly faded in the face of the intricate situation of the project for
the station, for which they envisaged very long times and therefore an
equally prolonged period of inactivity of the bridge itself. Without
changing the existing situation, Eugenio Miozzi then proposed a project
to be built in place of the nineteenth-century iron bridge that stood in
front of the Scalzi church.
The metal bridge was therefore
replaced by a new single-arch bridge made entirely of Istrian stone,
designed by the engineer Eugenio Miozzi (1889-1979). Construction work
began on May 4, 1932 and the bridge was inaugurated just two years later
on October 28, 1934.
Built in Istrian stone ashlars without the
use of armour, reinforced concrete or iron parts, the bridge was built
with the use of a special metal rib and applying the so-called
"systematic cracks" method. The parapet, internally hollow and openable,
contains the pipes.
Miozzi's attention to inserting the new
bridge in the urban context of Venice is demonstrated by the engraving
commissioned by the same architect in 1952, in which the bridge is
inserted in a view in clear eighteenth-century style.