The bridge in the sky connects two towns and crosses a chasm. It was built for people to drive up to the village to spend money and then to cross it and then to cross back or perhaps to embark on a longer journey but either way they end up back at the starting point. The bridge was built for people to pay in exchange for an experience, for suspension between two mountains, suspension over the fissure that you could maybe fall into but you don’t because the bridge is safe or you could maybe jump into but you don’t because you’re on vacation and this is fun.

It is a Tibetan-style footbridge which means it’s a simple suspension bridge anchored at both ends and sagging down by the force of gravity, its own weight pulling it into the shape of a catenary curve. A catenary curve looks like a parabola but it’s not a parabola actually it’s the shape of a hyperbolic cosine function. Hyperbolic relates to hyperbolas or hyperboles and one is just the path of a line on a graph when a cone intersects a plane but the other is the path that your mind takes.

From the bridge you can see the Rhaetian Alps and you can see the valley of Tartano and you can even see Lake Como. Who do you become as you cross the bridge and are you the same person when you cross back? The views on your left and your right are the same but they are switched and your perspective has changed.

The bridge is Tibetan but mostly Italian, it’s not in the Himalayas but in the Alps which are also mountains. It is the highest and longest suspension bridge in Europe at 234 meters long and 140 meters high [1]. It’s only a single meter wide so it’s not the widest bridge. Accolades make for a better attraction because it’s easier to get people to come to the town and spend money to cross the bridge and maybe eat some food or maybe even sleep there.

The town is Tartano, which has a population of about 200 souls. This number is under 15% of what it was 100 years ago [2]. Many of Italy’s small villages have been suffering from depopulation. The bridge was built in 2016 to get people to come but right now it’s closed, ponte chiuso per emergenza coronavirus. Tartano is in the Province of Sondrio which is in the region of Lombardy which has by far suffered the worst fate from the COVID-19 pandemic. At the time of writing, about 55% of Italy’s deaths and 40% of the total cases have been in Lombardy [3]. Over 17,000 people have died of COVID-19 in Italy and that is not hyperbolic. But there have been zero cases of the virus in Tartano [4].

The point of the ponte is to help “la piccola ma bella Val Tartano a non rimanere abbandonata a se stessa” [1], to help the small but beautiful Val Tartano not to remain abandoned to itself. Tartano has been abandoned to itself which sounds quite sad but which is probably a good thing for right now and probably why there are no coronavirus cases there. After this, maybe people will be less interested in living in cities like Milan and New York, maybe people will seek new lives and new perspectives and go to the mountains to cross bridges in the sky.

TARTANO, ITALY

1. Consorzio di Miglioramento Fondiario Püstarèsc. “Ponte Nel Cielo.” <https://www.pontenelcielo.it/it/>
2. “Censimenti popolazione Tartano 1861-2011.” Tuttiitalia. <https://www.tuttitalia.it/lombardia/62-tartano/statistiche/censimenti-popolazione/>
3. Statista Research Department. “Coronavirus (COVID-19) deaths in Italy, by region.” Statista. Accessed 7 April 2020. <https://www.statista.com/statistics/1099389/coronavirus-deaths-by-region-in-italy/>
4. “Coronavirus, quasi 500 i contagiati in provincia di Sondrio. La mappa interattiva comune per comune.” SondrioToday, 2 April 2020. http://www.sondriotoday.it/attualita/coronavirus/numero-contagi-coronavirus-morti-provincia-sondrio-ats-montagna-2-aprile-2020.html