The 'Little Venice' of the Po Delta — a lagoon city built on thirteen islands, where eel is the entire food culture and the light on the water changes everything
Comacchio sits in the Po Delta, 30km east of Ferrara, on thirteen small islands connected by canals and bridges — its nickname 'Little Venice' understates how fundamentally different it is from its more famous neighbour. This is a lagoon city whose entire food culture is built on one animal: the European eel (Anguilla anguilla), which migrates from the Sargasso Sea to spend its adult life in the brackish Valle di Comacchio before returning to the Atlantic to spawn. The local traditions of eel cookery — marinata (pickled in a sweet-sour sauce), in saor, grilled over embers, or in brodetto — ar…
Comacchio was a Byzantine port city (it appears in documents from the 6th century CE) that grew wealthy on the eel trade — preserved eels were a major commodity in medieval Europe, where they provided protein during the Christian fasting periods (Lent, Fridays, Advent). At its peak in the 14th–15th centuries, Comacchio was a significant rival to Venice in the Adriatic trade; it was eventually dominated by Ferrara and later by the Papal States. The 19th-century land reclamation of the Po Delta drained much of the surrounding wetlands, but the Valle di Comacchio lagoon (12,000 hectares) was pre…