The exhibition was promoted by the Administration Municipality of Bassano del Grappa for celebrate the conclusion of the long restoration of the Ponte Vecchio also known as the Ponte degli Alpini. "We are joyfully awaiting the opening of this important exhibition - declares the Mayor Elena Pavan -, an exhibition which, in addition to allowing us to retrace the fascinating history of this singular monument which has become a symbol of Bassano, represents the first of a rich series of events aimed at to celebrate its return to the city”.
Unlike most sixteenth-century architects, Palladio is a bridge architect: bridges of stone, wood and paper. The latter are undoubtedly those that will have a more marked impact on the figurative culture of the following centuries: published on the pages of Quattro Libri, the treatise published in Venice in 1570, they will become the protagonists of the dreams of eighteenth-century artists. Algarotti will ask Canaletto to show him the Rialto bridge as Palladio had thought of it, but also Bellotto, Carlevarijs and Piranesi they will make bridges one of the privileged subjects of their views.
La exhibition will tell the myth of the bridge, but at the same time he will speak of a concrete and real bridge for 500 years, the Bassano bridge, designed by Palladio, destroyed and rebuilt several times in an epic that from the eighteenth century of Ferracina reaches the present of the 'Bridge of the Alpini'.
The story of the exhibition will unfold from original drawings by Palladio, sixteenth-century books, ancient maps, eighteenth-century paintings, late nineteenth-century photographs, contemporary study models.
The exhibition is the result of a synergy between the Civic Museum of Bassano, the Superintendence of Archaeology, Fine Arts and Landscape for the provinces of Verona, Rovigo and Vicenza and the Center for International Studies of Architecture Andrea Palladio-Palladio Museum of Vicenza.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a scientific volume, able to provide the tools for reading the history of the Bassano bridge and its centuries of history.
The volume is divided into three sections. The first, of a historical nature, contextualizes the sixteenth-century construction phase of the bridge within the economy, politics and society of Bassano at the time, without neglecting the "prehistory" of the bridge, with the various crossings from the Middle Ages onwards. The second section, with a Palladian theme, will give an account of the novelties in research on Palladio and stone and wooden bridges, with particular attention to the bridge in the city of Bassano and to the one in Cismon del Grappa. A third section will concern the "material life" and the transformations of the bridge in a chronological arc that goes from its construction to the recent restoration, as well as the strength of its myth in the figurative arts.
