Ponte delle Torri
— the green falls away, and the stone keeps crossing.
Not only on a wall.
“A fourteenth-century aqueduct that became a road into the woods. It crosses the Tessino gorge on nine arches of pale stone, joining the old fortress on Sant'Elia hill to the wooded mountain of Monteluco on the far side. Goethe walked across it in 1786 and wrote it down; Turner sketched it from the road to Rome. For eight years after the 2016 earthquakes the bridge stayed shut, then opened again at the end of 2024. Now it carries walkers, cyclists, and dogs, all of them slowing somewhere near the middle, where the green is farthest down.
Ponte delle Torri, 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.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
The place, in three passes.
Ponte delle Torri stands at the southeastern edge of Spoleto, a hill town in the Umbria region of central Italy, north of Rome. The walkway runs roughly 230 metres across the Tessino gorge, close to 80 metres above the valley floor, linking the Rocca Albornoziana, the fortress on Sant'Elia hill, to the wooded slope of Monteluco opposite. The structure most likely follows the line of an earlier Roman aqueduct; its present form is attributed to Matteo di Giovannello, called Gattapone, working under Cardinal Egidio Albornoz after 1363. From the Monteluco side, the Giro dei Condotti footpath traces the old water conduits back toward the town.
The bridge reads as two structures at once: an aqueduct that carried water from the Cortaccione and Valcieca springs into Spoleto, and a parapeted walkway laid over the conduit so people could cross on foot. Its piers are massive, some roughly ten by twelve metres at the base, tapering as they rise to the nine arches that carry the deck nearly 80 metres above the torrent. The towers anchoring each end, the Rocca on the city side and the Fortilizio dei Mulini opposite, gave the bridge its name. Goethe, crossing in 1786, counted the arches at ten and set them down in his Italian Journey; the stone, built largely of local limestone, has moved little in the six centuries since.
After the central-Italy earthquakes of August 2016, Spoleto closed the bridge to foot traffic and kept it shut while engineers assessed the damage. Restoration ran on roughly 1.2 million euros of Ministry of Culture funding, managed through the Regional Direction of Umbrian Museums, and the walkway reopened at the end of 2024. It now stands open around the clock, with no admission fee, to walkers, cyclists, and people with dogs. The Giro dei Condotti, the path that descends along the old conduits below, gives the view most photographers want: the full span of arches against the green of the Monteluco woods. Spring and autumn are the easier seasons to walk it.