Walks on the Bridge

Minturno (LT)

Special openings and guided tours Sept. 15-Nov. 2, 2024
Archaeological Park of Minturnae and Ponte Real Ferdinando (Minturno, LT)

Walks on the Bridge is an enhancement project strongly supported by the Regional Directorate National Museums Lazio, which aims in the coming months to open to the public a place of culture that is normally not accessible. The walks will be on the Real Ferdinando Bridge in Minturno placed on the Garigliano River, which marks the border between Lazio and Campania. Not just a walk, then, but a real journey in space, in which one starts in Lazio and arrives in Campania, and in time, with the many stories the bridge has to tell.
Telling these stories will be the Luigi Giura Committee, which for years has been engaged in promoting and publicizing the enormous scope of the works of the engineer to whom we owe the construction of the bridge in the nineteenth century, after which it was named.
Visits will be included in the cost of the Park entrance fee, subject to statutory free admission.
The Bridge will be open to the public from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., with guided tours at 9:30 a.m. and 11:30 a.m. according to the following schedule:
Sunday, Sept. 15
Sunday, Sept. 29
Sunday, October 6
Sunday, October 13
Sunday, Oct. 20
Saturday, November 2

Historical background:
The Bourbon Bridge over the Garigliano Real Ferdinando is the first suspension bridge over iron catenaries in continental Europe, built between 1828 and 1832 to the design of engineer Luigi Giura.
A multifaceted and distinguished example of the modernity of the Bourbon government from an engineering, architectural and artistic point of view (with its Egypt-esque columns and sphinxes, evidence of Egyptomania related to the first excavations in Egypt), it is also a product of the industrial policy of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies.
In the first half of the 19th century the Bridge was built to provide a direct crossing of the river, replacing the ancient scafa (river barge connected by a rope between the two banks), to allow easy continuation of travel on the Appian Way, and reunion with the site of the Roman city of Minturnae where the Bourbons themselves had begun archaeological excavations in the late 18th century.
The Bridge in its case as a road work is also the mute witness of the last act of the unification of Italy under the new Savoy Kingdom (Battle of Garigliano October 29-November 2, 1860), before the siege of Gaeta and its dramatic end on February 13, 1861, and the hard battles along the Gustav Line at the end of World War II, which saw the destruction of the scaffold on October 14, 1943.

Archaeological Park of Minturnae and Ponte Real Ferdinando (Minturno, LT)
Via Ferdinando Borbone snc
+39 0771 680093
PEO: drm-laz.minturno@cultura.gov.it