Pont du Gard
— a bridge the Romans built for the water.
Not only on a wall.
“The tallest surviving Roman aqueduct bridge in the world, carrying the Nîmes water supply across the Gardon for almost two thousand years. Three tiers of dressed limestone, raised without mortar, the upper channel still pitched at the same one-in-four-thousand fall. The river underneath is swimmable in summer and runs olive-green in the shoulder seasons. The light off the stone at the end of the day reads gold.
Pont du Gard, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
The Pont du Gard crosses the Gardon river near Vers-Pont-du-Gard in the Gard department of southern France, about twenty-five kilometres northeast of Nîmes. The bridge is the surviving central span of a fifty-kilometre Roman aqueduct that carried water from springs near Uzès to the colonial city of Nemausus, modern Nîmes. The structure stands forty-nine metres above the river and runs two hundred and seventy-five metres across the valley. It was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 1985.
Three tiers of limestone arches, the lower six, the middle eleven, the upper thirty-five, the largest blocks weighing close to six tonnes. The stone was cut from a quarry six hundred metres downstream and raised without mortar. The joints are dry-fit, held by gravity and friction. Marks on the surviving stones record the masons' numbering system for placement. The dating is debated; recent work points to the middle of the first century AD under Claudius rather than the Augustan period.
The aqueduct carried roughly 40,000 cubic metres of water a day from the Eure springs near Uzès, a gradient averaging twenty-four centimetres per kilometre over the full fifty kilometres of channel. The Gardon below the bridge is a popular summer swim, with official bathing areas and seasonal lifeguards on both banks. In flood the river rises violently; recorded floods in 1958 and 2002 reached the lower tier of arches without dislodging a stone.