4 out of 5 stars
A copy of this was provided free of charge from the publisher in return for an honest review.
The Po is Italy’s longest river. At a smidgeon over 400 miles, it is almost twice as long as the Thames. In Italy, it is as iconic as our river too. It passes through 13 provinces as it flows from its source in the Alps to the delta in the Adriatic Sea. It has been a place that has witnessed a lot of history too, and the delta is the second largest in the Mediterranean.
It is this delta that he begins his journey from the sea to the source. He is bobbing around in a small boat trying to determine what is land and what is the sea. He passes little islands, called bonelli, that are formed and reformed by the sea and river each day. It used t be inhabited, there are buildings on the shorelines, but these are just shells now. All he can hear is the splash of fish and the calls of birds as he heads. This melding of sea and shore will set the tone of his travels upriver.
He is expecting a clearly defined river with banks that cut through the landscapes of Northern Italy. But he doesn’t find that. Instead, the same blurring of land and riverscape comes to define his journey. Finally making it out of the delta with its many tributaries he arrives in the region known as Polesine. Here the river is finally one channel, but it is still discombobulating as the banks are higher than the land around and he has to climb to see the water flow by.
He works his way upstream talking to the locals and teasing out the stories that this river has held onto and still has to tell. These stories have left traces in the culture and the people like the river itself have changed course in the landscape. We will learn about the amber that came down the river from the Baltic, to be worked on by Bronze age artisans and the puppeteers of the La Bassa Reggiana region. He is shown where to look to see the remains of old settlements and see the castle and fortresses where battles once took place.
I really liked this. Jones is a writer who is passionate and interested in the place that he has chosen to make his home. He doesn’t look at the places he travels to with rose-tinted glasses, rather he has that objective insight that you can only get from being an outsider. There are too many travel books out there that are mostly history and I think that he has got the balance of travel, anecdote and historical background about right too, he uses it to set the context of where he is. If you want a book about north Italy that is not about Venice then this is a great book to read.
Interesting that he works his way upstream, too; river books usually go the other way!
Now you have said that, I think you’re right. The last one I read by Tom Chesshyre went from the source of the Thame to the estuary.