It was not so much the sea in their faces as the river at their backs. The Po starts in the Italian Alps and flows straight across the peninsula, spreading into a marshy estuary from Ravenna to Venice. The valley of the Po is an anomaly of the Italian peninsula, so strikingly different that its uniqueness becomes apparent after a moment’s glance at a map of Italy. With the Alps to the north and the sylvan mountains of Tuscany to the south, one thick ribbon of rich, rolling green pastures stretches coast to coast along the Po. A haven for agriculture, this has always been the most affluent area in Italy, and today, known as Emilia-Romagna, it still is.The Romans built a road, the Via Emilia—today it is the eight-lane A-1 superhighway—connecting what became the centers of culture and commerce from Piacenza to Parma to Reggio to Modena to Bologna and on to the Adriatic coast. The agricultural wealth of this region depended on both a port for its goods and a source of salt for its agriculture.
