Four thousand years ago people built a village on stilts at the edge of a marsh here, and the muck preserved it. The Lagazzi del Vho site, near Piadena in the Po plain, was a Bronze Age settlement raised on wooden piles above a wetland, and thousands of its timbers, pots and tools lay waterlogged in the mud until archaeologists recovered them. It is one of the prehistoric pile dwelling sites around the Alps that UNESCO listed in 2011, and Italy has several. You will not see houses, since the evidence lies buried, but you will see a flat green plain that was once water, and a good museum in the town explains the finds.
The country is the heart of the Po valley, the great flat basin between the Alps and the Apennines, drained by the Oglio river. It is a land of poplars, maize, irrigation ditches and long straight roads, and in winter it is famous for fog so thick that you can lose the bonnet of a car. The villages are built of warm red brick, with a church and a square, and farms still keep pigs and dairy cattle. Cremona, famous for violins, lies to the south-east, and Mantua, with its Gonzaga palaces, is not far.
Sabbioneta, the ideal town named in the ride titles, is a short ride away and one of the oddest places in Italy. Vespasiano Gonzaga built it in the late sixteenth century on a perfectly planned grid with a theatre, a gallery and a ring of walls, and it was meant to be a perfect Renaissance capital in miniature. It never grew into the capital he dreamed of, and today it is a quiet, almost empty little town in the fields. UNESCO listed it together with Mantua in 2008.
Riding here is flat, quiet and pleasant, on small roads between fields, with canals and the odd levee. Expect farm traffic, crosswinds and mist in the mornings. Fuel is easy in Piadena, with a few thousand people, and Asola is a bit bigger. The food is rich: salami and cotechino, mostarda, a sweet and sharp fruit relish, and tortelli di zucca, the pumpkin-filled pasta of Mantua. Spring and autumn are the best seasons, and midsummer is hot and thick with mosquitoes. Take a short walk on the edge of the marsh, if there is a path.