Andrea Palladio · The Third Book
Chapter XIII. Of a Stone Bridge of my invention
THE invention of the following bridge, is, in my opinion, very beautiful, and well adapted to the place where it was to have been built; which was in the middle of a city, that is one of the greatest, and of the most noble in Italy, and is the metropolis of any other cities, and where there is a very great traffick carried on, almost from every part of the world, The river is very broad, and the bridge would have been in the very spot where the merchants assemble to treat of their affairs. Therefore, to keep up to the grander and dignity of the said city, and also to add a very great income to it, I made upon the bridge, its full breadth, three streets; that in the middle, ample and beautiful, and the other two, one on each side, somewhat less. On each side of these streets I ordered shops, so that there would have been six rows of them, Besides this, in the heads of the bridge, and in the middle, that is, upon the greatest arch, I made loggia’s, in which the merchants might have assembled to negotiate together; and it would have afforded conveniency, and very great beauty. One might have gone up to the loggia’s, in the heads, by a few steps; and level with them would have been the floor of all the remaining part of the bridge. It ought not to seem a novelty that loggia’s are made upon bridges, because the bridge Zlius in Rome, of which mention has been made in its place, was covered over with loggia’s, with columns of bronze, with statues, and with other curious ornaments. Besides which, on this occasion, for the above-mentioned reasons, it was almost necessary to make them. In the proportions of the pilasters, and of the arches, the same order has been observed, and the same rules that have been laid down in the above-mentioned bridges, which every one may easily find out of himself.
Parts of the plan.
A, Is the beautiful and ample fire made in the middle of the breadth of the bridge. Tue parts of the upright correspond to those of the plan, and therefore may easily be understood, without any farther explication.
the plate appears the upright of the same shops towards the freet.
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.