This week’s travel dream: Discovering the cradle of modern Italy

A journey along the Po River is a chance to imagine Italy’s early history unfolding, said Jonathan Keates in Condé Nast Traveller (U.K.). The nation’s largest waterway is “a tricky old stream.” From its start as a trickle near the French Alps, it takes a meandering course across northern Italy before becoming “a true lord over the landscape” as it enters the Po Valley’s fertile low country, or La Bassa Padana, near the city of Piacenza. Italy “came of age” in this long-embattled territory. The region’s handsome cities and villages help tell the story.

Piacenza is “an ideal starting point” for a sojourn along the Po. Built by the Romans for their army officers and given a name that means “a pleasant place,” this city has a central piazza featuring two vigorous figures on horseback, created by Francesco Mochi, that rank among “the finest equestrian statues ever conceived.” The riders were 17th-century dukes, members of the first of several grand families you’ll encounter while touring the Bassa’s cities. If you spend an evening inside Piacenza’s “sumptuous” 19th-century opera house, you may be inspired to stop next at the country villa of composer Giuseppe Verdi, or at nearby Busseto, a village little changed since the young Verdi took his earliest composition lessons there. The rhythms of the Bassa begin to emerge: “a land of big skies” and “rust-red soil,” with cornfields and orchards stretching out between yellow villages, “each marked by its soaring conical campanile.”

You pick your stops as you travel eastward: The city of Guastalla stands at the edge of “one of the Po’s most engaging stretches”—a “broad wetland oasis” that shelters herons, ducks, and egrets. Follow the Mincio, a major tributary, to see dashing Mantua, home to some of Andrea Mantegna’s finest frescoes as well as “two of the world’s greatest palaces.” Ferrara, the last of the old ducal capitals on the Po’s trek toward the Adriatic, still feels a bit like a frontier outpost, offering an “atmosphere of slightly melancholy romance.” You can imagine the first cattle herders who followed the Po upriver pushing into this territory and dubbing it “the land of calves”—a phrase that became “Italy.”

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At the Mantua bed & breakfast Armellino (bebarmellino.it), doubles start at $104.