You don’t have to have seen the series The wire to admire what was the Key Bridge in Baltimore, which collapsed when a gigantic container ship crashed into one of its pillars.
Bridges, after all, operate as a symbol and monument of civilization. You know that the Roman emperors were great bridge builders: supreme pontiffs, a title inherited from the papacy.
After all, you read things and after a few years you know things, even if there are many more things you don’t know. And when I saw on TV the images of the collapse of the Baltimore bridge I said to myself: but how come they didn’t have the pillars protected with a few Dukes of Alba?
Faced with the reader’s possible bewilderment, let me explain: a duc d’Alba is also a maritime work, which serves both to moor boats and to protect structures such as, for example, the pillars of a bridge. In the most traditional version they are a base of struts with a slab on top. And the name comes, curiously, from the Netherlands, when they were part of the Spanish empire.
There are several theories as to why this piece of modest naval engineering is called a Duke of Alba. The kindest one adds that, with the pillars being black or tarred and the headboard white, the design was reminiscent of Spanish clothing: rigorous black but with a white throat. Another version, less pious, claims that the sailors under the duke of Alba, governor of their lands and seas, threw the rope at the Spanish invention and dreamed that they were hanging the duke of Alba himself (the aristocrat, not the maritime work).
In any case, I remember my first trip to the United States and that it seemed to me that everything was better and bigger than in Spain. But nowadays the Spanish infrastructures are, in general, much better than the American ones, to say the least. And we have Dukes of Alba!
