Ponte Vecchio

For centuries, this bridge stank. Butchers, fishmongers, and tanners lined both sides, dumping animal waste straight into the Arno below. Then in 1565, Cosimo I de' Medici commissioned Giorgio Vasari to build a private corridor above the bridge connecting the Palazzo Vecchio to the Palazzo Pitti. The Grand Duke took one walk through his new elevated passageway, got a noseful of rotting meat, and in 1593 issued a decree: all butchers out, only goldsmiths and jewelers allowed. The bridge has glittered with gold ever since.

A bridge has stood at this narrow point of the Arno since Roman times. The current structure dates to around 1345, rebuilt after a catastrophic flood. It's the only bridge in Florence that survived World War II — in August 1944, retreating German forces demolished every other crossing to slow the Allied advance. Whether the Ponte Vecchio was spared on Hitler's direct orders (he'd visited in 1938 and reportedly admired it) or simply because it was too narrow for tanks remains debated. The Germans did destroy the medieval buildings at both ends to create rubble barriers instead.

Today roughly forty jewelry shops occupy the bridge, many still owned by descendants of the original artisans assigned spaces by Cosimo himself. The back rooms of these shops hang over the river on wooden brackets called sporti, giving the bridge its famously irregular, cluttered silhouette. Above it all runs the Vasari Corridor — a 750-meter enclosed walkway that once held the world's largest collection of artist self-portraits.

Come at sunset, when the Arno turns copper and the bridge looks like it's floating on liquid metal. That view has barely changed in seven centuries.