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Ponte Fabricio

Historic site · Ripa, Italy

The bridge linking the Isola Tiberina to the left bank, built in 62 BC and still in use. Two large slightly depressed arches rest on a central pier pierced by a relieving arch to reduce flood pressure; the construction is in cementizio with squared Gabine stone and tufa, faced over much of its length in travertine, and the brickwork belongs to the seventeenth-century repairs. Turismo Roma names Sant'Angelo as the rione the bridge reaches on the left bank.

History

It replaced an earlier timber bridge already standing in 192 BC, per Livy. Four large inscriptions on the arches name the builder, Lucius Fabricius, then curator viarum, and a smaller one records repairs by Marcus Lollius and Quintus Lepidus in the first century BC after two Tiber floods; Horace remembers it as a place from which the desperate threw themselves. Eugene IV paved it in travertine slabs in 1447, and Innocent XI consolidated the structure and remade the parapets in 1679. The parapet carries four-fronted marble herms, whence the modern name Ponte dei Quattro Capi, attested by the early sixteenth century; popular legend makes the herms four architects commissioned by Sixtus V to restore the bridge, who quarrelled and were beheaded on the spot at the end of the works. When the Jewish community occupied the area on the left bank the bridge was also called dei Giudei.

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