N. 14. - Inscription on PONTE VECCHIO (in the middle):
Reading edition
.......... in sul passo d’Arno. DANTE, Inferno, XIII, 146. .......... on the bridge of Arno.
“Florence”—says the suicide in Inferno XIII—“changed her first patron Mars for St. John the Baptist, for which reason the vengeance of the deity thus slighted will never be appeased: and were it not that on the Bridge of Arno some glimpses of him are remaining still, the city would already have been levelled to the ground, and thus the citizens, who raised her from the ashes to which Totila, King of the Goths had reduced her (550), would have laboured in vain.”
However the relic of antiquity, to which the superstition of Florence attached so high an importance, was carried away by a flood, that destroyed the bridge on which it stood, in the year 1337, without the ill effects that were apprehended from the loss of the fancied Palladium (see N. 15, 12).