Andrea Palladio · The Third Book
Chapter XII. Of the Bridge of Vicenza, that is over the Bacchiglione
THERE run through Vicenza two rivers, one of which is called the Bacchiglione, and the other the Rome. The Rerone, as it goes out of the city, enters into the Bacchiglione, and immediately loses its name. Over these rivers are two antient bridges; of that over the Bacchiglione, the pilasters and one arch, still intire, are to be seen near the church of S. Maria de li Angioli. The remaining part is all modern work. This bridge js divided into three arches; that in the middle is thirty foot wide, the other two are but two and twenty foot and an half in breadth; which was done that the river might have in the middle a freer course. The pilasters are in thickness the fifth part of the void of the lesser arches, and the sixth of the greater. The arches have in height the third part of their diameter. Their modern is in thickness the ninth part of the lefter arches, and the twelfth of that in the middle, and are wrought in the manner of an architrave, In the extream parts of the length of the pilasters, under the imposts of the arches, some stones project forward, which in building of the bridge, served to support the beams, upon which were made the entering of the arches. And, in this manner, the danger of the floods carrying away the beams, to the min of the work, was avoided; which had it been done otherwise, it would have been necessary to drive them into the river, to make the said entering.
D, Are the stones that project from the remaining part of the pilaster, and Serve
for the centring of the arches.
Public-domain text (London, published by Isaac Ware, 1738). Read from the Internet Archive’s scan (gri_33125011569684) of the copy in the Getty Research Institute, by way of Wikimedia Commons, where it is marked public domain. That scan’s text layer had lost the ends of the lines on every left-hand page, so the pages were read again from the scan’s images, the two readings compared word by word, and the text cleaned: the long s (ſ) is printed s and the ct and st ligatures as plain letters, words broken at the ends of lines are joined, and running heads, page numbers, signatures and catchwords are removed. Ware’s spelling, capitals and punctuation are otherwise kept (shew, publick, antient, compleat). Chapter titles and words the OCR misread were corrected against the page images. Some misreadings will remain, most of them in the italic prefaces and the Latin of Book III. Ware’s dedication, the list of subscribers, his table of terms, the errata and the bookseller’s advertisement are not reproduced. Nor are the 212 engraved plates, their inscriptions, or the keys to the letters on them that Ware prints in the text: where Palladio writes “as in the design” the figure is in the printed book.