Comacchio

Comacchio sits at sea level on thirteen islets at the southern edge of the Po Delta, fifty kilometers east of Ferrara and forty south of the Adriatic delta proper. The town was Etruscan, then Byzantine under the Exarchate of Ravenna, then part of the Duchy of Ferrara, and finally Papal until unification. The five-staircase bridge of Trepponti, commissioned by Cardinal Pallotta and designed by Luca Danese of Ravenna in 1634, joins the centro storico to the navigable canal Pallotta and stands as the town's symbol.

The Valli di Comacchio, brackish lagoons of around 11,000 hectares, formed by tenth-century subsidence and later silting, hold over 300 bird species including pink flamingo colonies and run as a protected area inside the UNESCO Po Delta inscription that covers the historic Ferrara plain. Eel fishing has shaped the local economy since the Middle Ages, with the Manifattura dei Marinati, the seventeenth-century eel-marinating works, now restored as a museum. The Museo Delta Antico, opened in 2017, holds the Spina Etruscan necropolis finds from the lagoon edge.