The rain is lacking and the level of the Tiber lowers. And there materializes a piece of ancient history that cyclically, with each shoal, resurfaces with its load of memory. And so, in a city that is rich in archaeological surprises, the foundations of an ancient bridge, usually impossible to see because they are always submerged, have reappeared from the river.

A bridge reminiscent of the Roman emperor Nero, who ruled the Eternal City in the first century, between 54 and 68 A.D., and which spanned the river with an archway next to the one that now joins Corso Vittorio with Castel Sant'Angelo and the Vatican's Lungotevere. It is also possible, however, that it was not Nero who ordered its construction, but his predecessor Caligula, to connect the Campus Martius to a personal Circus of his that was located near where the Vatican is today. But Nero had renovated it, and used it as part of the Via Trionfale.

The bridge, with its arches adorned with statues and trophies, was in fact dedicated to the passage of the victorious in war, of Emperors and Generals, but only those who had won a glorious battle against very dangerous enemies or if they had managed to win with little expenditure of men and money deserved the Triumphal Way.

The end? It was demolished probably in the first half of the fifth century AD, at the time of the Gothic War. And since then it has slept under the waters of the Tiber, resurfacing only on rare occasions when the city's river reaches levels too low, far from the usual five or six meters.