Ponte delle Torri

Interesting facts

J. M. W. Turner passed through Spoleto in 1819 and later painted The Ponte delle Torri, Spoleto, an oil now in the Tate's Turner Bequest.

The design is traditionally credited to Matteo Gattapone of Gubbio, the architect who also worked on Cardinal Albornoz's fortress beside it.

The channel on top brought water from the Cortaccione and Patrico springs on Monteluco, and it also kept the Rocca Albornoziana supplied.

The bases of the tallest piers measure up to about 10 by 12 metres.

In 1845 the town's gonfaloniere, Parenzi, had a window opened in the middle of the upper wall to frame the view down the gorge.

A niche in the wall, first used to keep watch over the aqueduct, later became a guardhouse for customs officers at the medieval city gates.

The hollow central piers, with their own doors and windows, are still used seasonally as a roost by bats.

The nineteenth-century Spoleto historian Achille Sansi argued that the bridge was a work of the medieval commune rather than of the Romans.

The low parapet that walkers lean on today, about one metre high, was only added in the late nineteenth century.

Why it is worth it

A wall of stone some 80 metres high and 230 metres long closes the gorge of the Tessino just below Spoleto, carried on nine tall, slender arches whose piers rise straight from the ravine floor. The bridge links the hill of the old town, crowned by the Rocca Albornoziana, with the wooded slopes of Monteluco opposite, and from either end it reads not as a bridge at all but as a single sheer screen of masonry hanging between two mountains.

Its origins are genuinely uncertain. Local tradition long connected it with a Roman aqueduct, and it did carry water across the gorge in an open channel along the top, but no certainly Roman fabric has been identified in the structure standing today. In its present form it was completed in the late fourteenth century, most probably after 1363, when Cardinal Gil de Albornoz was reasserting papal control over Umbria and building the fortress that still dominates Spoleto; the name refers either to the towers at its two ends or to the tower-like piers themselves. It is first mentioned in the Dittamondo of Fazio degli Uberti, written in the mid-fourteenth century. Some arches were pulled down in 1390 for military reasons and rebuilt in 1639, two more were redone in brick in 1845, and at the eastern end stands the small Fortilizio dei Mulini, built to guard the crossing and used as a mill until the nineteenth century.

Walk across it and look down: the piers are hollow, once used as guard posts, and the drop to the torrent is dizzying. Goethe crossed in October 1786 on his Italian journey and saw in it the way ancient architecture becomes "a second nature" in its landscape, a phrase that still fits. From the Fortilizio dei Mulini a level path, the Giro dei Condotti, named after the old water conduits, runs along the flank of Monteluco through holm oak, juniper and heather, looking back across the gorge at the bridge, the Rocca and the town.

Getting there

The bridge is on the upper edge of Spoleto, less than 1 km from the town centre, reached on foot from the area around the Rocca Albornoziana. The nearest airport is Perugia San Francesco d'Assisi – Umbria International Airport (PEG), about 45 km away.

Ponte delle Torri

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

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