Andrea Palladio · The Third Book
Chapter XV. Of the Bridge of Vicenza, that is upon the Rerone
THE other antient bridge, that (as I have said) is in Vicenza, over the Rerone, is vulgarly called I/ ponte dalle Beccarie, because it is near the greatest butchery of the city.
This bridge is intire, and very little different from that which is over the Bacchiglione, because it is also divided into three arches, and has the arch in the middle greater than the other two. All these arches are of a segment of a circle less than a semicircle, and without any ornament at all. The little ones are in height the third part of their breadth; that in y g! p. the middle, is something less. The pilasters are in thickness the fifth part of the diameter of the lesser arches; and they have in their extremities, under the impost of the arches, the stones that projet for the abovesaid reasons.
Both these bridges are made with slone from Cossoza, which is a soft stone, and is cut with a saw like wood. There are four bridges at Padua, made after the same proportions of these two at Vicenza; three of which have only three arches, and are the bridge of Altina, that of San Lorenzo, and that which is called Ponte Corvo; and one has five, and is, that which is called Ponte Molino. In all these bridges it is to be observed, that the greatest care imaginable has been taken in joining the stones together, which (as I have before observed) is extremely requisite in all fabricks.
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.