The Ponte Vecchio in Florence is over a thousand years old (at least in its original form which was first documented in the year 996—it's been destroyed and reconstructed a few times since then). Long ago, it was filled with butcher shops, and the butchers would throw the rotten meat into the Arno River below. The smell was so bad that the ruling Medici family first constructed their passageway, called the Vasari Corridor, from their Palazzo Pitti to the Palazzo Vecchio where they ruled the city, so they would not need to walk among the commoners and (perhaps more importantly) would not need to smell the rotten meat from the butchers.
The Arno River, with its rotten meat once flowing downstream, continues on to Pisa. And it's because of those meat travels down the river that a rivalry exists to this day between Pisa and Florence. Apparently the people of Pisa had more on their minds than just their Leaning Tower.
In 1593, the Medici family ordered all butchers off the Ponte Vecchio and replaced them with jewelers, and they remain to this day.
Interestingly, the term "bankruptcy" comes from the old merchant shops on the Ponte Vecchio in Florence. When the merchants couldn't pay their debts, their table or bench ("banca") was literally broken ("rotta"), preventing them from selling their goods anymore.
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