The legendary waterway is drying up. Travelling its length, Tobias Jones uncovers its fascinating history
Italy’s longest river, the Po, was once called the “king of rivers” by Virgil (“fluviorum rex”). It was considered mighty less for its length – it’s only about 400 miles (652 kilometres) long – than for its expanding girth: the countryside next to the river, the Padanian plain, was so flat that the Po was often less of a river than a slow-moving marsh, always flooding land dozens of miles either side of its porous banks.
Since it flows entirely in Italian territory – rising a few hundred metres inside the French-Italian border in the Cottian Alps and heading east until it reaches the Adriatic Sea just south of Venice – the Po is part of the national psyche. The poet Guido Ceronetti once wrote: “You need to understand the Po to understand Italy,” but now – as northern Italy faces its worst drought in 70 years – the river is also a prism through which to glimpse the country’s ecological emergency.
