Andrea Palladio · The Third Book
Chapter XIV. Of another Bridge of my invention
MY opinion being asked by some gentlemen concerning a bridge they designed to Plate build of stone, I made them the following invention. The river where the bridge was intended, is one hundred and eighty foot wide. I divided this whole breadth into three voids, making that in the middle sixty sfoot wide, and the other two forty eight foot apiece.
The pilasters that support the arches were twelve foot thick, and so were in thickness the fifth part of the void of that in the middle, and the fourth of the smaller voids, I somewhat altered, in these, the ordinary measures, making them very thick, that they might project out from the body of the breadth of the bridge; and that they might the better refit the impetuosity of the river, which is very rapid, and the stones and timber that might be carried down by it. The arches would have been a segment of a circle less than a semicircle, that the ascent of the bridge might have been easy and plain. I made the modern of the arches the seventeenth part of the void of the arch in the middle, and the fourteenth of the void of the other two.
This bridge might have been adorned with niches directly over the pilasters and with statues; and a cornice along its sides would have had a good effect: which was also sometimes done by the antients, as one may see in the bridge of Rimino, ordered by Augustus Clear, the designs of which have been given before.
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.