Puente de Alcántara is, arguably, the greatest of all Roman bridges. It doesn’t have the widest span (that distinction belongs to the delicate first century BC Pont-Saint-Martin in the Aosta Valley, Italy whose central arch leaps 32 metres) but the Puente de Alcántara possesses an extraordinary harmony in its parts and – as with all great bridges – astonishes in its daring ambition. It is a monument to man’s ability to tackle – and to solve in an elegant manner – the most daunting of structural problems. It rises 52 metres above the bed of the river, its two wide central arches have spans of 28.3 metres and 27.4 metres and its mighty piers – made of granite from a quarry over five miles away and laid without mortar – are each nine metres square, with some of the stones weighing 8 tonnes each.
The triumphal arch in the centre of the Puente de Alcántara, bearing a panel that proclaims the bridge was built in the fifth year of the reign of Emperor Trajan - so in around AD 103.
Like the Pont du Gard, this is indeed a mighty work of man that nature has assailed in vain. All here possesses a sublime and sculptural beauty, there are virtually no classical mouldings used in its design, no details or forms superfluous to function. But the bridge is not simply a structurally supreme but spiritually arid utilitarian structure. It also possesses those details, ornamental and symbolic, that are purely poetic and that transform a great functional work into architecture. And most of these details have to do with the human story of the bridge, and its strategic function in the Roman Empire. At one level the bridge is a monument to the man who made it, and to the Emperor who ordered its construction. In the centre of the bridge is an arch, called by some a ‘fortified gate’ and by others a ‘triumphal arch’. Both definitions are correct because it is both of these things, just as the bridge is both a triumph over nature and a key military installation. The arch made the bridge defensible, or rather made it possible for those who controlled the arch to stop the bridge from being used. Whoever held the arch controlled the road that the bridge gave purpose to. But an inscription on the arch also proclaims – in triumphal manner – that the bridge was built by Emperor Trajan in the fifth year of his reign, dating it to AD 103. The man who actually built the bridge gets a smaller shrine but a far more moving inscription. Opposite one end of the bridge survives a small votive temple, a place in which the god of the river, the valley – of the bridge – would have been venerated. It carries an inscription on a marble slab:
The Puente de Alcántara, Spain, built around AD 103: its dramatic setting demonstrates the heroic and poetic beauty of Roman engineering. On the right hand side is the small votive temple where the god of the river is appeased and where, perhaps, lies buried Caius Julius Lacer, the engineer of the bridge.
‘IMP.NERVAE TRAIANO CAESARI
AVGVSTO GERMAMICO.DACIO.SACRVM PONTEM.
PERPETVI MANSVRVM IN.SAECVLA.MVNDI.
FECIT.DIVINA.NOBILIS.ARTE.LACER.
‘I …. Caius Julius Lacer ….
have built a bridge which will remain forever.’
And remain it has. Indeed the bridge is so elemental a form that it became part of the very landscape and imagination of the succeeding generations that inhabited the region. For centuries after the fall of Rome, the Puente de Alcántara was abandoned – forlorn, desolate, unmaintained – but nonetheless it stood and it was used. When the Moors came to the north of Spain they saw it, they marvelled, and they named it Al Kántarah, literally meaning ‘the bridge’. This is the defining bridge: there can be no rival. But the Moors’ admiration did not stop them breaking one of the smaller arches in 1214 during their fighting with Christian forces, nor did its antiquity and beauty stop French troops demolishing one of the main arches in 1812 when retreating from Wellington’s army. Fortunately, the damage was repaired and the bridge survives – a message from one world to another, a marvellous repository of Roman genius that continues to serve the purpose for which it was designed 1,900 years ago, that continues to glorify the road of which it forms a vital link.
Well-built roads, passable all the year round and virtually impervious to the elements, were almost holy things in the Roman world, routes of trade and cultural growth, of conquest and of defence, the veins of civilization. This high status is reflected by a small and beautiful Roman bridge, dating from the late first century BC, that by good fortune survives in the south of France. The Pont Flavien at Saint-Chamas stands astride the Via Julia Augusta – an important route begun in 13 BC on the orders of Emperor Augustus to link the commercially and strategically important cities of Placentia (now Piacenza) in northern Italy with Arles in southern France. At Arles, the Via Julia Augusta linked with the far older Via Domitia that, dating from the second century BC, was the first Roman road built through Gaul and joined Italy to Spain. Placentia was, of course, linked by road to Rome, so the Pont Flavien – with its single stone arch of modest 12-metre span – formed a small but vital link on one of the key routes from Rome, via Arles and Nîmes in southern France, to Spain. This, plus the fact that the Pont Flavien stood within the zone of the cultural, if not political, frontier between Italy and Gaul, explains its extraordinary and ambitious design. Once seen, this exquisite bridge can never be forgotten.
In its small way, the Pont Flavien is a flawless evocation of Rome, a jewel of a creation, a wonder of preservation that is a window onto a long dead world. To reach the bridge you pass along a narrow and now abandoned stretch of the Via Julia Augusta and the first glimpse you get of the bridge is a pair of stone-built triumphal arches, miniature in scale but big in meaning and magnificence. They guard each end of the bridge and offer an extraordinary perspective to all who approach. The arch in front acts as a proscenium for the one behind: very dramatic and very theatrical, and surely a visual device to let the traveller know they had arrived somewhere very special, that they were now in the frontier zone. This pair of arches, that now look uncannily like the pylons of a nineteenth century suspension bridge, were surely intended to proclaim to all travellers heading west and north that Italy was being left behind, and to those heading south that they were now entering the inner environs of the empire, drawing yet nearer on the imperial highway to Rome itself.
The stretch of road between the arches is short, narrow and now pitted and rutted, scarred by generation upon generation of chariots and carts. But despite being only a stone’s throw in length, this small stretch of road offers a vast leap into the past. To stand on this bridge at dusk is to hover in time. Here, the Rome of 2,000 years ago seems not so very distant a place, the triumphal arches being strange portals that goad the imagination. Each arch is dressed with Corinthian pilasters and carries full entablatures, the friezes of which retain handsome swirls of stone-cut acanthus. This seems celebratory, but at the corners of the arches, set above the pilaster capitals, are carved eagles, surely representing the might of Rome, and above them, carved in the round, are lions drawing back on their hind legs and about to pounce. They seem to offer a fair warning to any traveller to behave or suffer the consequences.
The modest but beautiful 1st century BC Roman bridge at Saint-Chamas, Provence-Alpes-Cote d’Azur region, France. The bridge’s importance as part of the Via Julia Augusta is proclaimed by its pair of small but perfect triumphal arches.
On the bridge is carved an inscription that appears to date from the time of construction.
It refers to Lucius Donnius Flavos, a priest from Rome in the reign of Augustus, who is described as the bridge’s builder. Builder perhaps, designer perhaps, but almost certainly the man who – as a priest – dedicated this work to the gods and called upon them to guard it. The highway was sacred and so too was this bridge: then as a gate to the Roman Empire or
