Until the nineteenth century Venice had no fixed land connection. Crossing the lagoon meant boats. The first breach in that isolation was the Ponte Ferroviario, opened in 1846 to a design by Tommaso Meduna under the Austrian administration of the Lombardy-Veneto: a stone-and-brick railway viaduct of more than two hundred arches that for the first time bound the historic islands to the terra ferma. Almost a century later, with the rise of automobile traffic and mass tourism, a parallel road link became unavoidable. The Comune di Venezia entrusted the project to its chief engineer, Eugenio Miozzi, who in 1932 designed a reinforced-concrete causeway running alongside the existing rail viaduct, separated from it by only a few dozen metres of lagoon water.

Construction of the new bridge advanced quickly between 1931 and early 1933. Miozzi’s design called for a structure of 3,850 metres in length, with two carriageways and a tram track in each direction, supported on a continuous sequence of concrete spans crossing the open lagoon between Mestre and the islands. The bridge was inaugurated on 25 April 1933 in the presence of Benito Mussolini and named Ponte Littorio, the “Lictor’s Bridge,” in line with the regime’s habit of dedicating major civil works to Fascist iconography. For Miozzi the project was the most visible commission of a career largely spent solving Venice’s hard engineering problems, from the Rio Novo cut through to the foundations of the Lido bathing establishments.

At the end of the Second World War, with the Fascist regime gone and the Nazi occupation ended, the bridge was renamed Ponte della Libertà, “Liberty Bridge,” in keeping with a wave of post-war redesignations of public works across Italy. In the decades that followed the causeway became the single road artery feeding Venice’s historic centre, terminating at Piazzale Roma — the bus depot and car-park gateway used by every visitor arriving by land. In 2010 a People Mover monorail was added between the Tronchetto island, the Marittima cruise terminal and Piazzale Roma, completing the modern transport hinge. The bridge today carries dense daily traffic and remains at the centre of recurring debates over how much vehicular and tourist pressure the lagoon city can sustainably absorb.