Before the bridge, people crossed on shaky, unreliable walkways. At the beginning of the thirteenth century craftsmen from Calvello, working under the technical direction of Benedictine monks who were also engineers and bridge builders, threw a single segmental arch of dressed stone, on solid foundations, over the river La Terra, connecting the residents of the Piano with those of the Sant'Antuono quarter. The name comes from the small church the river people had dedicated to Saint Anthony the Abbot, known here as Sant'Antuono.
What to see
The bridge has to be read together with what surrounds it: to the north the houses climbing up to the castle, to the west the flank of the mountain chain rising beyond 1700 metres, to the east the Isca valley, to the south the shelter of the Timpo del Catagno. Below runs La Terra, a watercourse with continuous flow: Calvello is one of the few inhabited centres crossed by a river of this kind, and along its course it takes in rivulets from small valleys and channels, and water that, filtered through thick layers of sulphur and iron left by the ancient volcano, comes out in a narrow gorge among waterfalls and pools.
That water brought more than convenience. Once the crossing existed, the river became a cause of disputes, at times violent, because it served for fishing, for watering the vegetable plots and for drinking, and each bank claimed the use of it.
Visiting
Until the early twentieth century the bridge had undergone no alterations at all, having withstood weather and natural events unchanged. Its structural condition is still good, but the works carried out later have told on the whole, and it shows: the arch is the part that stayed as it was, and it reads better from the bank than from the roadway.
Our editors' tip
Come down to it from the castle rather than the other way round: take the route the people of the quarter took, and once you are below, follow the river upstream for a stretch, where the gorge narrows among waterfalls and pools. Wear shoes that can get wet, because the water here runs all year.