Spinadesco

Spinadesco stands on the northern bank of the Po, right opposite the point where the Adda ends. It is an ending worth looking at: the Adda is 313 kilometres long, it is the Po's greatest tributary and it is the longest river in Italy that never reaches the sea. It rises in the Val Alpisella, above two thousand metres, crosses the whole Valtellina, flows into Lake Como and out again at Lecco, comes down through the gorges between Bergamo and the Brianza — and here, after all that, it hands itself over to the Po.

Its name too is disputed: some derive it from the Latin ad dua, «two springs», and others from a Celtic word, abda, said to mean water that runs headlong. Headlong, around Spinadesco, it is no longer: here the river belongs to the plain, and its present shape in the lower Valtellina is even artificial, straightened in 1838 at the wish of the Austrian government to a design by the engineer Giuseppe Cusi. The village, which has left few documents — its coat of arms is of 1952 — lives on what the river has put around it: the riverside fields, and two rivers meeting.