RIALTO AS A HUB OF SOCIETY

di Deborah Howard*

The tragic coronavirus outbreak has, sadly, left us suspicious of social interaction, but it is worth reflecting that the Rialto market has always been a place where different classes, professions, trades and nationalities could intermingle, to exchange goods, opinions, news and anecdotes.   A curious event in the summer of 1588 – mid-way through the re-building of the Rialto Bridge in stone – confirms that the Venetian Republic valued the opinions of the members of the public who frequented the market-place.

The aptly named designer of the bridge, Antonio da Ponte, was a skilled and experienced Venetian proto (building technician), whose single-arched design brilliantly resolved the problem of the wet, unstable terrain.  The weight of the stone arch could have threatened to dislodge the abutments on the banks, but Antonio da Ponte designed a system to prevent sideways displacement by laying the foundations in tiers.  On these stepped foundations the stone could be bedded diagonally so that the outward thrust would close the arch, rather than sliding the beds outwards along horizontal planes.

Yet Da Ponte’s innovative and unexpected solution aroused suspicion.  An anonymous drawing in the Archivio di Stato, though damaged by damp, shows Da Ponte’s proposed foundations on the left and a preferred version with horizontal stones on the right. Clearly this draughtsman, like other critics, had failed to understand the mechanics of the bold design. There were, after all, no precedents for this innovative technology.

On 9^th August 1588 the Venetian Senate decided to set up a commission of five patricians to investigate the groundswell of criticism that doubted both the design of the new bridge and the quality of workmanship on the building site.  First of all, on 11^th August, the  commission interrogated sixteen ‘experts’ (periti, that is, proti and architects), and although a range of views was expressed nine of them agreed that the stepped foundations and diagonal masonry would be secure. 

The following day, on 12^th August, various bystanders and stall-holders gave their opinions.  These included an orange seller from Val Brembana, a sausage maker from Brescia, a wine merchant on the Riva del Ferro, a seller of malvasia wine from the calle dei Botteri at San Cassian, and a fruiterer originally from Bergamo.  These tradesmen were evidently intrigued by what they saw and spent long periods watching the work.  The wine merchant said he had watched the pile-driving for a quarter of an hour at a time – or sometimes half an hour, or even a whole hour. The task was hard, he reported, and sometimes it took half an hour to lay a single pile. 

The malvasia seller seems to have been a particularly curious and frequent observer: whenever he was turned away from one part of the building site he moved to another point.  Some piles, he said, took three hours to sink, but all were laid with ‘grandissima diligentia’.  He declared that he had often watched pile-driving in Venice, but he had never seen it done so well:  he truly knew what he was talking about, just has he knew how to ‘gustar un bichier de Malvasia, se l’è buona, ò cattiva, che s’è mia profession.’

Perhaps the fruit trade was slack at the time, for the fruiterer from Bergamo visited the site ‘quasi ogni giorno, perche io sto quasi sempre in Rialto e non ho molto che fare’.  A single pile beaten twenty-five times, he reported, might only sink by ‘doi deda’ (five centimetres).  He especially admired the way that the piles were bound together by iron bands, ‘che era belissima cosa a veder’. 

The support of this sample of views from the public seems to have carried some weight.  Soon afterwards Antonio da Ponte submitted a large wooden model to the Senate to determine the final design and its alignment, and the work resumed.  When an earthquake hit the city in 1591 the new bridge remained completely undamaged, and even when the structure was restored in 1975 the arch was found to be as firm as ever.  The old wooden drawbridge, lined by the shops of glove-sellers, booksellers, textile merchants, milliners, drapers and parfumiers, had already witnessed centuries of conviviality and conversation, and the new bridge would perpetuate the tradition of the Rialto as a lively, cosmopolitan meeting-place.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Biblioteca Marciana di Venezia, Cod. marc.it Z, 29 (=4796), Difficoltà sopra la fabbrica del Ponte di Rialto

Deborah Howard, Venice Disputed (2011), pp. 151-167

Donatella Calabi and Paolo Morachiello, Rialto: le fabbriche e il ponte 1514-1591 (1987)

* Deborah Howard membro del comitato scientifico dell’Associazione Progetto Rialto è professoressa emerita di storia dell’architettura all’Università di Cambridge.  Le sue ricerche riguardano, in particolare, vari aspetti dell’arte e dell’architettura di Venezia e del Veneto; lo scambio culturale fra Venezia e il Levante; e il rapporto fra l’architettura e la musica.  Fra i suoi libri: Venice & the East: The Impact of the Islamic World on Venetian Architecture 1000-1500 (2000); e Venice Disputed: Marc’Antonio Barbaro and Venetian Architecture 1550-1600 (2011).

Deborah Howard per Progetto Rialto is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license.