Ponte di Mezzo

This guide to Ponte di Mezzo in Pisa starts with a modern puzzle: why five hundred people pay to eat dinner at long tables laid across the roadway every June, a tradition organizer Stefano Maestri Accesi says sells out within days. It traces the bridge back to its medieval life as pons vetus, once crowded with shops and market stalls like a miniature Ponte Vecchio, through its collapse in sixteen thirty-seven and its rebuilding for the Medici. Along the way it asks why the shops never returned, and what took their place on the cleared deck instead.