Pavia's covered bridge carries pedestrians across the Ticino under a long tiled roof, with a small eighteenth-century chapel to San Giovanni Nepomuceno set into the middle span exactly as the medieval builders intended.
The first roofed bridge here went up between 1351 and 1354, on the piers of an older Roman crossing, after Galeazzo II Visconti decided the city needed a covered link to the fishing quarter of Borgo Ticino across the river. Allied bombing brought that bridge down in 1944, and the version standing today is a careful 1951 reconstruction, built a short distance from the original site with five arches instead of the medieval seven. Pavians still use it the way their ancestors did, as the natural route for an evening walk toward Borgo Ticino's trattorias, and the roof makes it one of the few bridges in Italy where a rainy crossing barely counts as bad weather.
