Among the bridges of the fourteenth century there are two that history has set down as very exceptional. One of them is a covered bridge over the Ticino at Pavia, erected under the care of Gian Galeazzo Visconti. Professor Fleeming Jenkin says of it: “This bridge, which still exists, has seven pointed brick arches, each 70 ft. in span and 64 ft. in height; the depth of the arch ring at the crown is 5 ft. 6 in. The tympanum is pierced; the bricks used in the arches are formed to suit their position, and are hollow in the middle to diminish the weight. The roof of the roadway is carried by a hundred rough granite columns.” This neat description is accurate, but in it the bridge is not visualised. Would that we had a Brangwyn sketch! I have by my side an engraving of the bridge, and the effect of the design is that of an open-work frieze. Each gracefully pointed arch is a repetition of the other six; the piers also are uniform and graceful, being all 16 ft. 3 in. wide; and all the spandrils are pierced in the same triangular fashion. The point of each triangle is turned downwards, its sides are the inner surfaces of two arch rings, and its base, turned upwards, and gracefully arched with seventeen long bricks, helps to support the parapet. On this parapet at equal intervals rise the hundred granite columns by which the covered roadway is carried. So the design is a clever feat not merely of repetitive decoration, but of repeating solids and voids that oppose each other in a harmony of contrasts; for the empty spandrils in their form oppose the leaf-shaped openings made by the arches, and all the curved solids of the bridge are foiled in a rugged manner by the upright columns, as well as by the long horizontal lines of the covered roadway. In the contrast between cold granite and warm brick there is colour also, and it suits the pulsating light and heat of Italy. As for the second bridge of the fourteenth century, which architects regard as very uncommon, it exists in drawings only, for it was destroyed by Carmagnola. Its founder was a duke of Milan, Bernabò Visconti, and it crossed the Adda at Trezzo. According to Hann and Hosking, it had “a single arch of granite, very well constructed of stones in two courses, the innermost 3¼ ft. thick in the direction of the radius, the outermost 9 in., the span at low water 251 ft.; the river rises sometimes 13 ft.” The radius of the arch was 133 ft. A span of 251 ft. in a stone bridge was a noble achievement. It is the largest that I remember. The Grosvenor Bridge at Chester has a span of 200 ft., just thirty yards wider than the central arch of Trajan’s Bridge over the Tagus. New London Bridge in her finest arch attains a span of 152 ft., beating Waterloo Bridge by nearly eleven yards. Two French bridges of the eighteenth century--the Pont de Lavaur and the Pont de Gignac--have spans of 160 ft.; and let me refer you also to the Pont de Neuilly-sur-Seine (p. 338).