Codigoro, Italy

Codigoro is a flat, working town at the eastern edge of Ferrara province, where the Po di Volano and Po di Goro once converged, a meeting old enough to have given the place its name, from the medieval Caput Gauri. The centre holds little to detain a visitor: a working riverfront, a fruit-and-grain economy, an ordinary Saturday market. But two kilometres north, standing alone in fields that were open marsh within living memory, is one of the most important Romanesque monuments in Italy: the Abbey of Pomposa, its 48-metre bell tower visible for miles across land that has only existed, in its present drained form, since the nineteenth century.

Monks settled here as early as the seventh century, sheltered by lagoon and marsh; by 874 Pomposa was already a Benedictine abbey with a European reputation, and within two centuries one of its own, a monk named Guido, had invented the system of musical notation still taught today. Dante passed through in 1321 on a diplomatic errand for Ravenna's lords and, as the story is told more as legend than record, left the final cantos of the Paradiso here before the fever he caught on that journey killed him. The abbey's own fortunes ran the other way: the coast retreated, the marsh turned malarial, and by 1650 the monks had abandoned Pomposa for Ferrara.

What makes Codigoro worth the detour is the walk between those two facts: a medieval monument abandoned to geography, and a modern town built entirely by engineering. Follow the river path from the centre toward Pomposa and you cross land drained by the pumping stations that still stand, rusted but intact, monuments to the reclamation that created the ground underfoot. Beyond the abbey, the Canneviè oasis keeps a fragment of the old brackish marsh alive, thick with herons and waders. It is a short, flat, unhurried walk, an hour or two, through a landscape that explains itself as it goes: everything here, tower included, stands only because someone decided the water should recede.