now that is all well and good but i had a wonderful Idea what if those buildings were not shops, but houses! it could help Italy quite a bit, Since In Italy you can only build on an existing foundation, you could just build houses over the river or the pond, or whatever instead of in the ground! but then again, now that i think about it, that would ruin the whole beauty of Italy wouldn't it? with the rivers and such, but maybe someplace else, like over the Hudson, the new yorkians are always complaining about how ugly and polluted it is, just cover it up! i mean, keeep working to clean it up, but just build a bunch of bridges over it, and give it to the homeless people.The Ponte Vecchio (pronounced [ˈpɔnte ˈvɛkkio]) (Italian for Old Bridge)[1] is a Medieval bridge over the Arno River, in Florence, Italy, noted for still having shops built along it, as was once common. Butchers initially occupied the shops; the present tenants are jewelers, art dealers and souvenir sellers. It has been described as Europe's oldest wholly-stone, closed-spandrel segmental arch bridge,[1] but there are far older segmental arch bridges such as Alconétar Bridge. The Ponte Vecchio's two neighbouring bridges are the Ponte Santa Trinità and the Ponte alle Grazie.
