Along the 45th parallel: from rice fields and vineyards to pink flamingos at the mouth of the Po

Not even travelling down the Nile had I ever seen a sacred ibis, prince of the marshlands, with its black head and downward-curving beak like an unsheathed scimitar. Yet here was a pair of them beside the main road, searching for frogs or insects in a ditch, beneath a warehouse on which someone had written: “We make fog here.” Except there is hardly any fog left, really. It has been dried up by climate change and the near-disappearance of the pollution that once trapped droplets of water in that thick, suspended haze. And so, travelling along the 45th parallel, kilometre after kilometre, a whole encyclopaedia of small discoveries gradually finds its way into my heart. Along this imaginary line that cuts across northern Italy from Montgenèvre to the beach at Boccasette, where the Po flows into the Adriatic and pink oysters are cultivated in the lagoons between farmland and sea. The 45th parallel, to be precise. Halfway between the North Pole and the Equator. Five thousand kilometres above your head and another five thousand beneath your feet. Photo: Raffaele Panizza As anyone travelling along the Milan–Genoa motorway or the A21 Turin–Brescia may happen to notice, just beyond the border between Lombardy and Piedmont, an orange-and-black sign marks this balance between the two extremes, between Cascina Chiozzo and a trotting-horse breeding farm. Between Voghera and Casteggio, meanwhile, an overhead road sign announces the geographical divide and the entrance to the Oltrepò, a curious region where the climate sometimes resembles Saxony's and sometimes Yemen's, with temperature swings of up to 15 degrees Celsius that Pinot Noir grapes — ideal for traditional-method sparkling wines — positively adore. Indeed, this is known as the wine parallel, or wine's “golden latitude”: an imaginary trellis stretching across the sky, along which grow the Cabernet vines of Bordeaux, the Viognier of the Rhône, the Nebbiolo of the Langhe and the Areni Noir of Mount Ararat. Vineyards in the Langhe region of Piedmont. And buzzing around it is Apis mellifera ligustica, also known as the Italian honeybee, which thrives here thanks to the abundance of alfalfa and the flowering encouraged by fluctuations in temperature. In Casteggio, Luca Bonizzoni keeps 2,000 bee colonies producing the extremely rare indigo honey, with an almost weightless texture on the palate and none of the cloying sweetness. In short, I had hoped this journey would have something exotic about it, but I had hardly expected quite so much. Livorno Ferraris At dawn, I drove slowly towards the rice fields of Livorno Ferraris: not marshes, but floating meadows the colour of mustard, while tractors with cage wheels stood in the shade of farmhouses, waiting to be put to work. Without warning or an appointment, I knocked on the door of Tenuta Colombara, home to a museum dedicated to the mondine, the women who traditionally worked in the rice paddies, and where Acquerello, the rice aged for eight years so prized by chefs, is produced. “When I started, people said it was impossible to cultivate rice beyond this latitude, because rice is a tropical cereal,” says founder Piero Rondolino, walking through the old stables lined with photographs taken in the area by Gianni Berengo Gardin. The stables at Tenuta Colombara. Meanwhile, the sun breaks through the clouds, illuminating one of the chimneys of the Trino Vercellese nuclear power station. In the 1960s, it was the most powerful in the world, outstripping its American and French counterparts and producing 13 times the electricity needed by the entire province of Vercelli. Then came Chernobyl. The referendum. The hole in the ozone layer. Aerosol sprays. CO2. Renewable energy. And the most recent summer, the hottest of the century. “Our rice fields don't seem to be in danger, though,” Rondolino explains. “For every tenth of a degree the temperature rises, I can increase production. And if the fields dry out earlier, I can sow the rice directly into dry soil.” But that rule applies only here, in a region supplied with water by Europe's largest catchment basin. Water flows constantly down from the Aosta Valley, reaches Ivrea and floods the fields through irrigation channels and a canal commissioned in the 15th century by Yolande of Savoy, the French wife of Duke Amedeo, an unfortunate man lost in mysticism and epilepsy. Alluvioni Piovera If Livorno Ferraris takes its name from Galileo Ferraris, who discovered the rotating magnetic field and invented the alternating-current electric motor, Alluvioni Piovera owes its name to the flooding of the River Tanaro, which for centuries swept the settlement away whenever the waters rose. “Even today, when we want to describe a marshy patch of land, we call it a tanaromorto,” says mayor Gian Piero Borsi, who governs this watery territory without any opposition on the municipal council. At Bar 381, the only one left, another figure has come to greet me: a rather disdainful-looking gentleman with a shock of white hair and the boots of a country squire. Count Niccolò Calvi - Photo: Raffaele Panizza “Allow me to introduce Count Niccolò Calvi,” says the mayor. “We've been working together to make the village beautiful since 1975, and we still address each other formally.” The count lives with his wife and their son Alessandro in Piovera Castle, a magnificent Visconti fortress surrounded by centuries-old gardens. “It was the first historic residence to open to the public,” he explains, a pioneer of what has since become common practice. There is a former lemon house for weddings, which he affectionately calls the orangerie, an enormous museum of traditional crafts and 60 rooms that hosts a huge escape-room game. There is a gallery of natural sculpture displaying tree trunks in fantastical human and animal shapes. And there is a curious workshop containing 3,000 drawings for 3,000 words, a paper-based game invented by the count and loved by schoolchildren, who visit in large numbers with their classes. Beneath the coat of arms of the ancient family, it is time to say goodbye. The count recommends stopping at Da Manuela, a restaurant with a legendary trolley offering 140 cheeses. Then there is Bassignana, through which the VenTo cycle route linking Venice and Turin passes. Or Novi Ligure, with its Museo dei Campionissimi, dedicated to cycling champions Fausto Coppi and Costante Girardengo. And since no one is following me along the broad road, I zigzag along the 45th parallel towards Cantine Ballabio, hoping to watch the sunset from the giant butterfly-shaped bench overlooking the family's vineyard. And suddenly, in the trigonometry of things, this parallel universe becomes perpendicular and steep. This article was reviewed by an external translation partner