The Beauty Of Bridges

To commemorate the 71st anniversary of the opening of the Golden Gate Bridge yesterday, Wired.com featured a photo gallery of important and unique bridges from around the world:

The Ponte Vecchio (Old Bridge) across the River Arno in Florence, Italy, dates back to Roman times, but the current bridge (so to speak) dates back to 1345 (by Taddeo Gaddi), with the long upper gallery added by the great Renaissance architect Giorgio Vasari in 1564. It is probably the oldest segmental-arch (that is, the arches are not the full semicircles of Roman design) bridge in Europe. It is certainly among the most romantic.

From personal experience, I can certainly attest to their description of this beautiful span...from the outside. The interior however, is crowded with cheesy shops hocking gaudy jewelery to slack-jawed tourists; the experience was as if I had wandered into a strip mall filled with Zales. Slightly less than magical.