In Tolve the bridge goes by two names, Ponte Vecchio and Ponte del Diavolo, the Devil's Bridge, and nobody has ever agreed on how old it is. The original structure is plainly Roman, reworked later in the Middle Ages: some scholars argue it was built in medieval times and that is all, others hold to the more demanding hypothesis, that the troops of Gaius Terentius Varro crossed it on their way back to Rome after the defeat at Cannae. It is the most argued-over single thing in the whole of Tolve's territory.
What to see
Little of Roman Tolve is left that you can look at standing up. From the end of the 3rd century to the 1st century traces of settled life are thin, and you have to reach the imperial period to find them again: the villa of San Pietro, with its bath house and its late-imperial mosaic floors, the villa of Piforni, then fragments of columns, funerary inscriptions and coins of the Augustan age scattered across the fields, a sign that people had come back to farm the land once it was safe again. The bridge is the exception: a structure still standing and still readable, which is exactly why it is fought over.
Looking at it means looking at two building sites laid one over the other. The plan is Roman, the medieval hand came afterwards, and the scholarly argument grows out of that overlap: where one ends and the other begins. The second name, Ponte del Diavolo, is the one you hear most often in the village.
Visiting
There is no ticket and no opening time: the bridge stands in open country, well away from the town, which is gathered on its sandstone spur at 568 metres, where the Castagno stream runs into the Bosco torrent. Ask for directions in the village and count on a stretch on foot. The first thing to look at is the arch, taken from the side rather than from the roadway.
Our editors' tip
Go in summer, when the torrent bed is dry: you can get up to the springing of the arch and see the masonry from a few centimetres away, which is the very point scholars have never agreed on. And ask for directions using both names, because Ponte Vecchio and Ponte del Diavolo are the same bridge.