(Ferrara and Comacchio, Italy)…The north eastern parts of Italy, just before the country takes a swing right towards Venice, were a revelation. Two towns stood out, Ferrara – cold in winter, baking and occasionally gusty in summer – and the lagoon-side Comacchio, famous for eels. Both were easily accessible from Bologna, which has direct air service from London.
The surroundings of Ferrara are quintessentially the Italy of fictional character Don Camillo, the erratic priest always at odds with his Po Valley town’s Communist mayor Giuseppe Bottazzi – a plot line that reminds me of the later Graham Greene novel Monsignor Quixote. Don Camillo country is best represented by being very flat and studded with tall, square church clock towers, which can be seen from miles around. We espied many both before we reached Ferrara and especially afterwards.
Ferrara in August was warm and still. Our steps were languorous along the very long Via Carlo Mayr, which revealed striking, tall town houses and ended at part of the city walls by a park. The centre of this university town has two large piazzas, one facing the cathedral and leading beneath a huge arch to a smaller square with a market, the other on another side of the cathedral, with outdoor restaurant tables and shops in arcades. As we sat dining, half the town seemed to be blowing away in the wind, which might be the same bora-type gales that can whip pedestrians off their feet in Trieste.

A first port of call was the Palazzodei Diamanti on the Corso Ercole I d’Este, along another hot, straight street where a crossing bicycle perhaps a quarter of a mile away disappeared and then popped back out again in the heat haze. The palace gets its name from the 8,500 diamond-shape, pinkish concrete knobs that speckle its exterior. Built in the 15th Century, it now houses an art gallery and university buildings, but it can be visited. It is pleasing to the eye, but perhaps I was more excited to find nearby a cash dispenser covered in cobwebs and specks of tree seeds that – if it had cash inside – would dispense Italian lire, not European euros (see photo above). What a find for 2012, 13 years after lire and its comical number of zeroes were consigned to the rubbish heap. But there it was, not dismantled or hidden behind new bricks.
The Castello Estense, or Castle of Saint Michele, sits in the middle of the city and a water-filled moat. It was the scene in 1385 in which the Ferrara locals – the Ferrarese – tore to bits the official they heard responsible for numerous years of nonstop, severe drought. Actually, the city rulers at the time, Niccolò I and Alberto, sensibly decided to sacrifice the first person below them they presumably would not miss, one Tommaso da Tortona, but this was child’s play compared with the public torture in the main square earlier that century of Giovanni d’Este, the bastard brother of the same Alberto, and the public burning of Costanza dei Quintavalli, who both were also accused of diverting normal weather patterns. No wonder the wind has not since ceased howling. The Po carries on flowing gently by, though.
The B-class road towards the Adriatic Sea curves around the marsh and rice fields of the Valli di Comacchio. A spot of pilgrimage for us on the way was the very small town of Anita, which supposedly was the place of death of Ana Maria de Jesus Ribeiro, the at-the-time pregnant wife of Italian hero Giuseppe Garibaldi, who was actually born in Nice in today’s France. Born in Brazil of Azorean heritage, Ana Maria, or Anita for short, probably succumbed a little farther around the lagoon, some five kilometres away, in Mandriole, but perhaps do not try telling that to the locals in Anita.
Comacchio came as a surprise. It has a touch of Venice about it, sans the 250,000 daily tourists. A wooden lookout looks over the lagoon and the occasional eeling boat, while behind are a couple of canals built by the Emperor Augustus in the century before Christ. The most notable bridge here spans three canals, the two-towered Trepponti constructed in 1638 by another Giovanni, Pietro de Lugano. This is where Ferrara’s River Po finally makes its way to salt water.
We wandered along several canals – it does go by the moniker Little Venice – to a number of small restaurants that serve that increasingly rare commodity, eels. Quite tasty, and we were told the biggest cardinal sin of cuisine here is to cook them in oil. Be warned! In October there is an eel festival that hopefully coincides with eels starting to make their journeys from the lagoon all the way to the Americas and the Sargasso Sea. An unusual sight is the Anders Lassen Statue, by the aforementioned lookout, which commemorates a Danish soldier who died here in the last days of World War II.