Liberty Bridge

In 1929, thanks to the engineer Vittorio Umberto Fantucci, the project was born which, carefully revised and modified by the engineer Eugenio Miozzi, will be carried out in 1931.

The main architect of the bridge, Eugenio Miozzi, chief engineer of the municipality of Venice, writes:

«On July 27, 1931, the works for the road connection with the mainland began and were completed on April 25, 1933, after only twenty-one months.
It was a grandiose work: the bridge crossing the lagoon is in fact four kilometers long and twenty meters wide; another four kilometers of road were built on the swampy lands of the salt marshes to reach the town of Mestre: the said bridge remained the longest bridge in the world [currently the longest in Italy, n.d.a.] and required three hundred kilometers of stilts, forty thousand cubic meters of concrete, twenty thousand cubic meters of bricks, forty-five thousand tons of freestone; so much so that the Podestà Alverà, in the inauguration ceremony, could say that this was the most grandiose work completed after the fall of the Republic and that it could be on a par with the construction of the famous Murazzi.
Together with the creation of the bridge, the urban planning of the internal roads was provided, creating the Rio Novo which shortens the route to Piazza San Marco by over two kilometers; the largest garage in the world was built, which still retains this record; and the numerous ancillary works of the new traffic were provided for ».

At the time of the inauguration, which took place in the 11th year of the Fascist Era, the bridge across the lagoon was called Ponte del Littorio.

In 1945, after that short period, it was renamed Ponte della Libertà.

The two parallel transagunar bridges, the railway one and the automobile one, today represent the gateway to Venice, by far the most popular.

However, as Thomas Mann writes in Death in Venice, the service doors remain, the admirably sumptuous one of the San Marco Basin always being the authentic main entrance.