Rivers, bridges and mills have long been features of interest for travellers and artists in Italy. They had an aesthetic value as landscape elements, particularly for seekers of picturesque subjects in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. At the same time, the dangers of crossing rivers and streams, which in Italy can suddenly flood and become impassible following intense storms, was a major challenge to travellers. Reports of dangerous crossings and floods provide sublime interludes in many travel accounts, including Goethe’s adventurous crossing of the Salso, in Sicily, in April 1787. It was raining steadily and travelling was slow and unpleasant, as they ‘had to cross several rivers which were in flood’. When they reached the Salso there was no bridge and

Once the ‘whole cavalcade had assembled on the bank’ Goethe’s party was assisted ‘across the second arm of the river in the same fashion’.

The principal river of the Valle d’Aosta is the Dora Baltea, which flows from west to east, joining the river Po near Chivasso, east of Turin. The Dora receives the waters of many alpine streams and has high water levels in late spring and summer, when snow and glaciers melt. This is also the case of many rivers of Piedmont in the area of Turin and Cuneo, including the Dora Riparia (Susa Valley) and the Tanaro. Liguria’s main ridge separates the northern catchment, which is part of the Po river basin, from the southern one, in the Ligurian–Tyrrhenian basin. Some rivers, such as the Bormida, the Stura and the Scrivia, rise in Liguria and flow north, joining the Po in Piedmont. In the southern catchment rivers are very short and with torrential regimes. They are often dry but can be subject to sudden floods, especially in the autumn.