Ponte Emilio, Rome

That lone stone arch rising from the Tiber is Ponte Emilio, also called Ponte Rotto, the Broken Bridge. It is Rome’s oldest Roman bridge built in stone. Before stonework, a timber crossing stood here; during the second century before Christ it became masonry.

In its working life, it carried traffic between the Forum Boarium—the cattle market of ancient Rome—and Trastevere across the river. Floodwater repeatedly battered it after the empire’s fall. A late sixteenth-century flood swept away much of the structure, and the crossing ceased to serve as a bridge.

The arch before you preserves work from that rebuilding era, borne by piers whose fabric reaches back to the second century before Christ. A nineteenth-century iron walkway once linked this fragment to shore, until construction of Ponte Palatino removed the remaining section. What endures is an unusually vivid fragment of Roman infrastructure: a crossing transformed into a ruin.