In Tuscany, the most beautiful region of Italy, there’s a curious bridge with a house on it. The bridge’s mystery can’t immediately be appreciated, unlike its shape, since the whole world’s heard about its form, and what the whole world knows is no longer a mystery. However, it does carry deep inside a hidden secret, which has nothing to do with its construction, its shape, the people who built it or the time it comes from. The mystery concerns the bridge itself.
Its magnificence extends over the narrowest part of the Arno River, and its soul is alive just like the water flowing under it. Its soul knows that magnificence has nothing to do with size, history or outward appearance, and it proudly welcomes people from distant countries.
It is believed that the bridge existed even in the time of ancient Rome, though the city where it is today isn’t called Rome, but Florence. Ponte Vecchio, the Old Bridge, the bridge with a house on it… Connecting roads since ancient times, it has suffered many floods, accidents and reconstructions. They say that it acquired its present shape in the fourteenth century, and that the first stalls appeared on it in the thirteenth. Those were the years when its soul was just breaking through, and it fought for its place in human time. The time when, due to excessive fear of hunger, people didn’t believe that even living rivers could have a soul, or that the same river under the Old Bridge churned debris every day from tanning-yards, butchers’ and fishmongers’ shops. Yet those shops, like all other forces characterized as bad, had their converse, positive side. They became houses and many among them, spiky over the water, turned into permanent places of residence. Thus, the surface of the bridge took on the appearance of a house. And nobody asked whether the bridge wanted a house on it.
Its appearance wasn’t as important as its power to support the souls of the fortunate and unfortunate people who passed over it, or survived thanks to it. Some of them became rich and some, when they went bankrupt, were beaten by soldiers who destroyed their shops. Such people said goodbye to the bridge, but they knew that it would always carry their stories and sadness, and they visited it later with joy so that it could remind them of something they themselves were afraid to remember. Despite the dread memories, those people knew why they were coming back. The bridge carried their wisdom and the wisdom of other people who had left their lives on it, and it could teach them something.
According to history, traders were expelled from the bridge in the sixteenth century and small jewellers took their place. Despite these events, the bridge, even in those times, cared nothing for what was happening on the surface; it was important for itself, mostly because of the great secret it carried. The waters of the Arno River rose often and assailed its height, but the bridge was indifferent even then. People would walk over the bridge again after repairs, and only that was important, since that fact kept it alive. Even if the river won and it crumbled, the Old Bridge knew that someone would rebuild or repair it simply because its place has always been there, over the narrowest part of the river. And even if it completely disappeared, the idea of the bridge would live forever, and nobody could erase that from the face of the earth!
Once, when the river rose more than six meters, the jewellery shops were flooded and the gold disappeared under the bridge, just as wealth vanishes after a man’s demise, for when he no longer exists it isn’t his any more. The bridge remained, renovated, but strong. And the house on it? The house changed, it was repaired and torn down, for some it was useful and for others it was a hindrance, but above all it was just a house whose entire existence depended on the bridge, which lived with its secret.
Nonetheless, the secret of the bridge was so simple that it was discovered many times before this modern age, and even now many can reveal it. It is manifested in the minds of all those who are on the bridge at this moment, because people create their own worlds every day from nothing, and that’s why it reveals itself differently every time. But those who want to access the world of that secret completely must remember one thing: while passing the Old Bridge they mustn’t remain indifferent, for indifference kills the secret!
(from the book “Secret of a bridge”)