Po Delta

The light comes first. Before you see any birds or water or the particular flatness of the landscape, the light of the Po Delta announces itself — a quality of luminescence over still water that I’ve seen described as painterly so many times in travel writing that the word has been emptied out, but here it is actually accurate. The delta has been flattening its landscape for millennia, depositing silt from the Alps and the Apennines into the Adriatic, producing a land that is neither sea nor solid ground but something in between — a world of lagoons, channels, brackish marshes, and reed beds that extends for about sixty kilometres along the coast between Ferrara and the mouth of the river.

I arrived in April, which is flamingo season. Nobody had told me there were flamingos in Emilia-Romagna, which is perhaps the greatest failure of regional tourism marketing I’ve encountered. In the Sacca di Goro — a large lagoon on the southern edge of the delta — several hundred greater flamingos were wading in the shallows, pink against the grey-green water, their reflections perfectly doubled in the still surface. A solitary birdwatcher with a scope was the only other human being visible in any direction. I stood on the reed bank and watched for an hour without a word being said, which was either meditative or simply too good for conversation.

The eel is the culinary emblem of the delta. Anguilla from these waters has been smoked and sold along the Adriatic coast for centuries, and in the small town of Comacchio — an island settlement threaded by canals, sometimes called “the little Venice” though it needs no such diminishment — the eel festival in late October is serious business. Comacchio’s historic valli — the eel-rearing lagoons — produced eel commercially for centuries. The fish were trapped in the autumn as they migrated toward the sea on their single oceanic journey, a journey they make only once, to spawn somewhere in the Sargasso Sea and then die. This information lends the eel a certain gravity. I ate it at a table above a canal in Comacchio, grilled over charcoal, with no sauce, and the fat of it was rich and oceanic and unlike anything I eat in Mexico or France.

Comacchio itself is strange and beautiful in the way that island towns are — the streets run along canals, bridges connect everything, and the proportions are completely un-metropolitan. The Trepponti — a seventeenth-century bridge with five stairways — is one of the most photographed structures in the delta, for good reason: it manages to be both architecturally ambitious and completely suited to its environment. I crossed it several times at different times of day and watched how the water changed colour underneath it.

The Po Delta Park covers about sixty thousand hectares and is jointly administered between Emilia-Romagna and Veneto. Cycling is the most sensible way to explore — the terrain is absolutely flat, the distances manageable, and the network of dyke roads gives access to areas that no car can reach. I rented a bike in Comacchio and cycled for three hours along the valley of the Reno river into an emptiness that felt genuinely wild, passing only an occasional farmhouse and once a heron standing so still in the shallows that I initially mistook it for a fence post.

When to go: April through May for migratory birds and the best light, and for cycling without heat. October is excellent for the eel season and the particular autumn quality of the delta light. Winter is cold and atmospheric — the fog that rolls in from the sea across the flat landscape is remarkable but requires tolerance for grey.