The Este dukes of Ferrara loved their countryside retreats, the delizie, and they scattered them across the flat land around the city like jewels on a cloth. The Diamantina, near Vigarano Pieve west of Ferrara, was one of them, an estate of farmland, woods and buildings named after the diamond, a symbol of the Este family. The delizie are part of the UNESCO listing of Ferrara, City of the Renaissance, and its Po Delta, which recognises the city's planned urban layout and the way the Este shaped the surrounding landscape, draining marshes and creating farms and hunting grounds.
Ferrara itself, a short ride away, is one of the great Renaissance cities of Italy, with a massive moated castle in the centre, a cathedral, and a perfectly preserved ring of walls that you can ride around, or better, walk or cycle on top of. In the late fifteenth century, Duke Ercole I commissioned the architect Biagio Rossetti to design a new quarter, the Addizione Erculea, with wide straight streets and elegant palaces, one of the first examples of modern urban planning in Europe.
The riding in the Po plain is flat and straight, through fields of wheat, maize, fruit trees and rice, with long roads running along the embankments of rivers and canals. It is not exciting, but it has a certain hypnotic charm, especially in the early morning, when the mist rises from the fields and the poplars stand like ghosts. In winter, dense fog can settle for days, making riding dangerous, and the summer can be hot and humid, with mosquitoes near the water. Watch out for tractors and cyclists, who are everywhere in this flat land.
Bondeno, about seven kilometres away, is the nearest town of any size, with fuel and shops, while Ferrara has everything you could need. The local food is rich and distinctive: cappellacci filled with pumpkin, salama da sugo, a spiced pork sausage cooked for hours, and the coppia ferrarese, a twisted bread with protected status. Further east, the Po Delta is a world of lagoons, marshes and flamingos, with quiet roads along the dykes and the sea on the horizon, a fine destination for a gentle ride.