Ask anyone which city has the most bridges in the world and the answer will most likely be Venice. It is a completely understandable reflection, given that no other place has transformed the absence of roads into such a recognizable identity, to the point of making the bridge not an infrastructure but an element of urban furniture, as good as a square or a fountain. The world record, however, takes a different path and ends in Hamburg, a city that has a much less scenic and much more practical relationship with water.
The record that belongs to Hamburg
Guinness World Records credits the German city with between 2,300 and 2,500 bridges within its municipal boundaries, more than the sum of Amsterdam, London and Venice. The figure fluctuates because, bureaucratically, counting bridges means establishing where a walkway ends and a viaduct begins.
Thus, as often happens, the reason for this exceptionality lies in geography. The Elbe flows through the city towards the North Sea, the Alster extends into the Binnenalster and Außenalster lakes, while canals and port basins multiply the banks. Hamburg transformed this fragmentation into an urban method, and each neighborhood required railway crossings and pedestrian thresholds.
A city built between water and passages
Some crossings have the scale of large works, such as the Köhlbrandbrücke and the Elbbrücken, others bypass the central Fleete almost with the size of a domestic corridor. Guinness itself indicates the Zollenbrücke, dated 1663, as the oldest in the city. Iron, stone, concrete, rails and walkways make up a vast repertoire. The most theatrical scene arrives in the Speicherstadt, the warehouse city that grew up on the Elbe islands between 1885 and 1927, recognized as a UNESCO heritage site together with the nearby Kontorhaus district. Here the red brick facades overlook the canals and a network of roads and bridges holds buildings, docks and water together.
And Italy?
No Italian city comes close to Hamburg’s numbers, but the national record leaves no doubt, Venice is the city with the most bridges. The data speak of 435 bridges that connect the 121 islands of the historic center, a number which however has never been definitively established (depending on the sources we speak of 417 bridges, others report 340, still others 354) because it depends on how the private passages are counted, those on the smaller islands of the lagoon and the votive bridges, mounted every year on boats on the occasion of religious festivals such as the Redeemer.
It is not surprising that Guinness looked elsewhere: unlike Hamburg, where the primacy arises from the iron logic of the infrastructure, in Venice the bridge remains first and foremost a question of streets, islands and everyday life, certainly more difficult to line up but, at the same time, easier to talk about.
