Today one of the symbols of the city of Taranto, the Ponte Girevole has turned 60 years old. For the occasion, the extraordinary opening, the firing of salute from the battery of the Aragonese Castle, the inbound and outbound transit of a Navy ship followed by rowing lances of the Taranto associations. There was also the exhibition of the Navy fanfare and the projection of historical photos in the southern gallery of the Aragonese Castle. The Castle for the occasion was flagged and artistically illuminated in the evening. Named after San Francesco di Paola, patron saint of seafarers, the iron bridge connects the new part of Taranto to the old city. The latter is an island surrounded by the two seas of Taranto, Mar Grande and Mar Piccolo, and is connected to the mainland, or to the rest of the city, by two bridges: the stone one and the revolving one.
The Ponte Girevole is 60 years old but the first swing bridge was inaugurated in May 1887. It was built by an engineering firm from Naples. The turbines that ensured its operation were driven by the fall of water into a cistern located in the Aragonese Castle right next to the swing bridge. This bridge was similar to the one built in 1861 in Brest, a French city with which Taranto will later establish a twinning. Between 1956 and 1958 the old bridge was replaced by the current one. With electric operation and a little wider than the previous one. The works were carried out by the Civil Engineers and the Taranto shipyards. The then Head of State, Giovanni Gronchi, intervened at the inauguration on 10 March 1958. In addition to allowing the passage of pedestrians and vehicles from the new city to the old and vice versa, the swing bridge also connects the Mar Grande, the bay of Taranto, with the Mar Piccolo, which is an inland sea. The opening of the bridge occurs through the rotation, on a particular gear, of one arm at a time and is used to make the ships going to the Mar Grande or Mar Piccolo pass along the navigable channel. Until 20-30 years ago the bridge was opened frequently, because in the Mar Piccolo there were the shipyards of Fincantieri and the naval base of the Navy.
Then the shipyards abandoned Taranto followed by the Navy which transferred the fleet to the new naval base of Mar Grande, in Chiapparo, thus freeing itself from the bridge openings. Today, therefore, the swing bridge rarely opens. And only if a Navy ship has to reach the military arsenal docks, also in Mar Piccolo, for repair or maintenance. As operational units, however, the Mar Piccolo base hosts only submarines, which however do not need the bridge to open to allow them to pass through. The ships that the Navy has decommissioned are also anchored in Mar Piccolo and among them the cruiser Vittorio Veneto, former flagship of the fleet. For extraordinary maintenance, in 1984 the bridge was closed to traffic for a few months and a pontoon bridge was placed along the navigable canal, similar to the one built in 1957 for the construction of the revolving tower. At the beginning of 2000 the Spanish architect Oriol Bohigas, commissioned by the then mayor Rossana Di Bello to study a recovery plan for the old city, hypothesized a second swing bridge not far from the first: the original would only be used for pedestrians and the new to traffic, but the idea did not go through.