River
Fluvius Afesia
Adige · Etsch
Listen to the story
A long river rises in the mountains and runs past Verona into the Po: this is the Fluvius Afesia, the Adige of northern Italy. The map goes astray twice here. It places the source beyond the road from Augsburg to Salzburg, far from the real spring in the Rhaetian Alps, and draws the course well away from Trento. And the river never joined the Po; as the Roman writer Pliny knew, it had its own mouth on the Adriatic. In Roman times it flowed past Este, a town probably named after it, until the great flood of AD 589 seems to have shifted its bed southwards.