1977: The Opening of a Bridge that Crosses Italy’s Gulf of Taranto

July 30, 1977

A girder bridge in the city of Taranto in southern Italy’s Apulia region was formally opened to traffic. This 6,263-foot (1,909-meter)-long vehicular bridge crosses the Gulf of Taranto and serves as a link between the city’s areas of Punta Penna and Punta Pizzone. The bridge was built to accommodate the increasingly heavy traffic in that part of Italy.

Originally called Ponte Punta Penna Pizzone, this structure was renamed Ponte Aldo Moro in 1978 in memory of a longtime Italian statesman who had been killed that same year. Aldo Moro, who served as prime minister of Italy between 1963 and 1968 and again from 1974 to 1976, was born in the Apulia region in 1916. He received his high school degree from the Archita Classical Lyceum in Taranto. Moro was kidnapped by the Red Brigades in Rome on March 16, 1978, and shot to death 55 days later by a member of that terrorist group.

Photo Credit: Sagittarius A (licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en)

For more information on Ponte Aldo Moro (originally known as Ponte Punta Penna Pizzone), please check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ponte_Punta_Penna_Pizzone