The Castelvecchio Bridge, also known as the Scaliger Bridge, is an infrastructural and military structure located in Verona along the Adige River, which is part of the Castelvecchio fortress and is considered the most daring and remarkable building of the Veronese Middle Ages. It was destroyed during World War II and rebuilt in 1951.
The bridge was built between 1354 and 1356 under the rule of
Cangrande II della Scala, with the function of providing an escape route
to Tyrol for the fortress under construction of Castelvecchio in the
event of an uprising by one of the enemy factions inside the city. The
designer and executor of the bridge is unknown, however a document from
1495 (hence more than a century posthumous in relation to its
construction) seems to indicate a certain Guglielmo Bevilacqua as the
author, protagonist, among other things, of the legend collected by the
chronicler Girolamo "From the Courtyard" in " Historia di Verona": in
fact, it is said that Cangrande II della Scala gave Bevilacqua a sword,
supposedly belonging to San Martino, which had previously been kept in
the church of the same name, a building that at that time stood within
the walls of Castelvecchio. On the other hand, some scholars have put
forward a hypothesis, based on the analogy between this bridge and what
is called delle Navi, of a common paternity, which should therefore be
attributed to Giovanni da Ferrara and Giacomo da Gozo.
The
strength of the structure allowed the bridge to go through five
centuries of history unscathed, until in 1802 the French, who occupied
Verona under the Treaty of Luneville, cut down the tower in the
countryside and removed the battlements, as they had previously done for
the bridge. other towers of the castle, designed to accommodate
artillery batteries, which were then used during the famous events of
the Verona Easter. Finally, on April 24, 1945, the bridge was blown up
by German soldiers retreating towards Germany, along with all other
bridges in the city, including the even older Pietra Bridge.
Immediately after the war, it was decided to restore it along with other
important monuments of the city lost during World War II. Supported by
public opinion, and given that, despite the strong explosions, at least
some of the piers were preserved, the superintendentship of Verona,
represented by Piero Gazzola, decided to restore the situation before
the explosion, rather than build a new bridge. For the renovation
project, Piero Gazzola used the collaboration of the engineer Alberto
Minghetti for the technical part and the architect Libero Cecchini for
the artistic part.
The first work began at the end of 1945 and
included clearing the bed of the Adige River from debris, and in the
second stage, which began in 1949, stone slabs found intact were moved
to their original position thanks to photographic documentation and
filming made shortly before the destruction of the bridge itself. In
addition, thanks to the study of the chromatism of the stone, it was
possible to trace the quarry from which the blocks were mined in the
Middle Ages, located in the territory of San Giorgio di Valpolicella,
from which, in this way, new stones were extracted to replace the
damaged originals. The original brick, composed of different earths and
unequal sizes, instead came from different kilns, so it was decided to
get a new one from the construction sites of the demolished buildings
and from various kilns in Verona and Mantua. Restoration work ended only
on July 20, 1951.
The bridge belonging to the Castelvecchio complex seems to be a bold
work for the period in which it was built: the right arch has a span of
even 48.69 meters, while the two secondary arches have spans of 29.15
and 24 meters. Some scholars even believe that the main arch was the
largest in Europe at the time of its construction, and its size was
useful for boats to pass through. The varying widths of the arches and
the masses of the pylons can be traced back to studying the different
distribution of currents in this meander of the river; this particular
bridge project, conceived from a purely functional and structural point
of view, determined in any case a new Gothic figurative solution.
The base of the pylons and the tips of the arches, and hence the
lower part of the structure, are made of stone, while the rest of the
bridge is made of terracotta, a material characteristic of all medieval
monuments of Verona. The two pentagonal-based pylons, directed towards
the mountain to facilitate the flow of the waters of the Adige, are
extremely massive, and the largest of them was decorated with fifteen
Corinthian capitals and fragments of Roman bas-reliefs. The path over
the bridge, more than one hundred and twenty meters long and more than
six meters wide, is protected by battlements of the dovetail type with
passages and loopholes, as well as an imposing citadel towards the city
and a tower, cut off by the French in the 19th century, towards the
countryside.