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The saying "don't look a gift horse in the mouth" is difficult to translate into Italian and it’s even harder to convince the Venetians of the truth of this proverb. That’s because the “gift” they were given by the Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava has ended up costing the citizens of Venice a cool 12 million euro and has taken 12 years to complete. Calatrava’s innovative design for a fourth bridge over the Grand Canal was presented to the city of Venice with much fanfare in 1996 and construction on the “passageway of light”, as its creator once called it, began in 2002.

Now, more than six years later, the bridge was finally due to be inaugurated on Thursday September 18 in the presence of Italian president Giorgio Napolitano but then the ceremony was abruptly cancelled. “There’s no way we’ll expose the President of the Republic to all this controversy,” explained Venice’s mayor Massimo Cacciari. “There won’t be any official opening ceremony – not now, not ever.” Instead Cacciari said the 94-meter (308 foot) long steel and glass structure would simply be made available at some point with neither pomp nor pageantry.