1. Sansovino continues with his description of the city: ". . . però 450 & piu ponti di pietra viva, le congiungono insieme l'una con l'altra . . ." (Sansovino, Venetia città nobilissime e singolare, 3); Evelyn is quoted in Morris, Venice, 143.
4. Mazzi, "Note per una definizione della funzione viaria," tav. 1. Figures 1-3 are based on Mazzi's map.
6. Sanudo is aware of the historical and geographical considerations:
Quasi tutti le case, maxime di conto--però che oltra il Canal Grando bellissime ne sono per le contrade--hanno riva et porta da terra, però che sono infiniti, e quasi sine numero rii, cussì chiamati, di acqua che si partonno dal Canal Grando, et vanno per diverse contrade, sopra delli qual sono ponti, antiquitus de legno, al presente tutti si rinovan di piera (Sanudo, Laus urbis Venetae, 21).
7. I propose to use the word "stone" for any bridge not made of wood, regardless of whether it is actually stone, brick or some combination.
8. A riva (plural rive) is a quayside, similar to a fondamenta, but wider, suitable for large boats, and frequently running along the outer edge of the city or the Grand Canal. The origin of the word riva is the Latin ripa, meaning "bank."
10. Mazzi, "Note per una definizione della funzione viaria di Venezia," on the map following her page 30 (shown here as figures 1-3), shows bridges by century with the accompanying parish identification; I was able to create a list of bridge locations by street and canal, and to locate these on the de'Barbari map. I then used the bridges' illustrations on the map to determine their respective building materials with a reasonable degree of accuracy.
12. For a drawbridge, see the Rialto bridge as depicted in Carpaccio's Miracle of the Rialto Bridge.
13. Such moves were possible, as shown by the modern-day bridge put up every November across the Grand Canal for the Festa della Salute (figure 4). The pilings are anchored not on the bottom of the canal, but on large floating barges.
14. It is impossible, from the de'Barbari map, to determine the composition of five of the bridges completed by this period. It is also possible that some of the bridges shown on de'Barbari's map as stone construction were replacements for previous wooden ones.
15. Mazzi, "Note per una definizione della funzione viaria," map after p. 30; Mazzariol, La pianta prospettica di Venezia del 1500; Sansovino, Venetia città nobilissima et singolare, 3.
16. Goy, Venice: the City and its Architecture, 101-05. Thomas Coryat provides an entertaining, if false, history of the new bridge; in his account, the stone bridge was erected because a wooden one "was not correspondent to the magnificence of the other parts of the City," with the old one being first "defaced" (Coryat, Coryat's Crudities, 310). The truth was that wooden bridges at the Rialto had several times collapsed, generally causing injury. "Magnificence" may well have been a part of the reason for constructing in stone, but safety was definitely another. The Myth of Venice, the mechanism through which Venice presented itself to the world as a near-perfect governmental entity, seems to have extended to non-governmental particulars, as Coryat claimed to be merely repeating what he had been told by many "Venetian gentlemen."
17. This minimum connectivity is best seen in the northern reaches of the Cannaregio sestiere, which was, by no coincidence, the last area of the city to be fully settled and filled in. Older areas, such as south of the Frari, and the Rialto district, show a different form of connection, as the islands are larger, so that more than one bridge from one large island to another large island is the norm. (Note that there are a number of rio terre in these older areas, and that also may have affected the number of bridges; as canals were filled in, pairs of islands would become a single island; if the bridges remained in place, the number of bridges from one island would increase.)