Shigeru Ito was already passionate about painting in his childhood, but it was only in retirement that he found the time to resume his passion. While searching for suitable motifs, he was fascinated by the sight of one of Colognes bridges while fishing in the Rhine, its functionaltechnical aesthetics and its embedding in the wide river landscape, and he decided to paint it. In the following months, this beginning developed into the idea of artistically capturing all the German bridges across the mighty river between the German-Swiss, German-French and German-Dutch borders.