What I experience while walking, and especially when I'm on a pilgrimage, is that I have a much greater eye for detail than I normally have. The moment you can let go of all the thoughts that occupy your mind and truly be present in the environment you're walking in, that, for me, is one of the many wonders of pilgrimage.
- Regine Alewijnse, pilgrim (Facebook post, 2025)
The seminary in Rovigo does not provide breakfast, or kitchen facilities, so I was out the door early in search of the nearest café. The Chinese bartender greeted me cheerily with "Want a croissant? We have croissants!" holding aloft a tray of freshly baked ones with a variety of fillings. "I can smell them," I replied as she slotted the various types of croissant into their places in the display case. I picked one and ordered a soy cappuccino to go with it, watching the teenagers filing past the window of the café on their way to school.
I brushed my teeth in the café washroom and was on my way by 7:30, rejoining the Adigetto river/canal and following it out of town along a cycling track. A graffiti artist with a sense of humour had painted the likeness of "Saint Pedaleon" under a bridge, in male and female versions 😁
I left the canal at Sant'Apollinare, where I paused briefly in front of the church to drink, take off my long-sleeved shirt and put on my sunhat. At 8:30 in the morning, it was already growing warm! I was glad I had decided to hike in my thin cotton sleeveless shirt rather than the merino wool T-shirt I normally wear. I crossed another river - the Canal Bianco - and continued along its embankment before turning off along the highway to Pontecchio Polesine. Here I stopped at a bar beside the community sports centre for a glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice and a sandwich. In this part of the country they make very nice tramezzine: triangular sandwiches of white bread, with the crusts cut off, rather like the ones the British serve with tea, but stuffed to bursting with delicious fillings that start to bulge out as soon as you bite into them 😋
I chose one with tuna and pickled onions, even though it was only 9:30 in the morning - the good thing about tramezzini is that it's acceptable to eat them at any time of day!
On my way out of Pontecchio I met Enzo, a pilgrim who will be departing next week for Spain, to walk the Camino d'Invierno from Ponferrada to Santiago. We chatted about various camino routes and I asked him to write a few words in my pilgrim book/credential. Then I began a four-kilometre stretch across a featureless plain to the river Po, walking on a paved cycling track beside the highway.
The straight stretch was over in no time, and soon I was putting up my feet for a rest with an ice-cold drink at the Circolo ARCI in Guarda Veneta.
Pretty much every small town in Italy has a Circolo ARCI. Basically it's a bar, the kind where old men hang out playing cards all afternoon; technically, it's a non-profit association, and you're supposed to be a member to use the facilities. ARCI is a recreational and cultural association formed in 1957, reappropriating the Case del popolo community centres that had been opened by the Communist party in the early twentieth century and then forcibly taken over by the Fascist party and converted into Case del fascio. The association has more than a million members all over Italy, and organises cultural events such as concerts and film screenings as well as providing social welfare services and promoting the integration of immigrants. And operating low-cost bars/clubhouses in small towns all over Italy!
Just past the ARCI clubhouse was an attractive restaurant offering a complete three-course menu for 15 euros, but I preferred to get through the last hour or so of the day's walk, in full sunshine on the paved road atop the embankment, before eating and so I carried on. The river is actually some distance from the embankment at this point, behind rows of poplar trees, so I didn't even have a proper view of the Po until I was almost in Polesella.
A bit of history - and geography: Polesine
The area known as Polesine, from the medieval Latin word policĭnum, meaning swamp, is a strip of low ground around 100 kilometres long and 18 kilometres wide between the Adige and Po rivers. The eastern portion of Polesine corresponds to the delta of the Po, and it is constantly expanding eastward because of detritus carried by the rivers sedimenting.
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| The location of Polesine in Italy |
The Po and the Adige are Italy's first and the third biggest rivers in terms of rate of flow, and yet another river flows across Polesine between these two main rivers, the Canal Bianco; this means that by far the majority of Italy's fresh water flows into the sea through the Polesine area. Due to this large amount of water it has to deal with, it has many canals for drainage.
The first attempts at draining the swampy land by constructing canals date back to Etruscan times, five or six centuries before the Christian era. The Romans kept up the good work, but after the fall of the Roman Empire, the Lombards ceased performing maintenance on the flood defences with intention of isolating Padova from Byzantine Ravenna and from the Franks in the northwest. On October 17th, 589, a major flood known as "the breach at Cucca" wreaked destruction on the area. The Adige river overflowed with a "deluge of water that is believed not to have happened since the time of Noah", according to the 8th-century historian Paulus Diaconus; the flood caused great loss of life and destroyed part of the city walls of Verona, as well as paths, roads and a large part of the countryside in lower Veneto. By a sort of domino effect, dams and flood defences downstream broke one by one; the results were so dramatic that the port city of Adria, which was important enough to give its name to the Adriatic Sea, became land-locked, fully 22 kilometres from the new coastline!
Contemporary historians debate whether this was the result of a single catastrophic flood as reported by the 8th-century historian, who was in any case writing 200 years after the fact, or simply the product of centuries of intentional neglect on the part of the Lombards, wishing to cut off Ravenna by reducing the area to a swamp again. In any case that is what happened. And in 1152, another disaster changed the hydrography of Polesine: a breach opened in the banks of the Po at Ficarolo, and the river's new main course flowed much closer to the Adige, reducing the size of the Polesine between the two rivers. In 1438 the course of the main branch of the Adige changed, so that it no longer flowed through Rovigo but in its present location.
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| An 1885 map showing the present course of the rivers (from Wikipedia) |
In 1882 the territory between the Adige and the Canalbianco was flooded, displacing 63,000 people, most of whom emigrated to Mexico and South America.
Most recently, two thirds of the Polesine area was flooded in 1951, when 150,000 people had to be evacuated. Many of them moved to the industrial cities of northwestern Italy.
To protect those who remained against further flooding, it was decided that the banks of the Po would be raised considerably, requiring the destruction of the historic town centre of Polesella, originally a picturesque riverside village, and its reconstruction behind the embankment, completely changing the layout of the town and producing today's rather anonymous settlement of 3500 people.
Part of the historic town survives, just behind the embankment, but has a cut-off and abandoned feel now that the centre of attention, and business, is along the modern highway.
Historic buildings that have been saved include a number of noble villas and the parish church, the Madonna del Rosario, built in 1737.
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| Ca' Rosetta (17th century) |
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| Madonna del Rosario (1737) |
Rovigo - Polesella 20 km
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