Po Valley
— — the slow river the fog rises off of.
Not only on a wall.
“The plain Italy doesn't talk about. Forty-six thousand square kilometres of farmland between the Alps and the Apennines, the Po running its slow course east to the Adriatic. Rice paddies near Vercelli flood in spring. Parmigiano ages in Parma. In autumn the fog settles over the fields by four in the afternoon and the church towers vanish into it. — from the studio
Po Valley, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
The Po Valley, also known as the Pianura Padana, is the alluvial plain of northern Italy, roughly 46,000 square kilometres bounded by the Alps to the north, the Apennines to the south, and the Adriatic to the east. It is the country's largest plain and its agricultural and industrial heartland, holding Milan, Turin, Bologna, Verona, and Padua. The Po, at 652 kilometres, is Italy's longest river and drains the entire basin. The land sits low, much of it below 100 metres, which is why the fog hangs so heavily in winter.
The Po rises near Pian del Re in the Cottian Alps and runs 652 kilometres east, gathering 141 tributaries on the way, including the Ticino, the Adda, the Oglio, and the Mincio, before braiding into a delta of seven mouths near Comacchio. The river carries the snowmelt of the Alps and the rain of the Apennines into one slow channel. Floods in 2000 and 2014 redrew embankments along its lower reaches. The 2022 drought left river-bed barges visible and exposed a sunken World War II vessel above the waterline near Mantua.
The plain runs on fog. From October through February, cold air pools in the basin and the humidity of the rivers and rice fields condenses into the nebbia, the dense ground fog that Italians north of the Apennines plan their winter driving around. In summer the same low elevation traps heat and humidity, sometimes pushing Milan above 36°C. Spring brings the flooded paddies near Vercelli, where rice has been grown since the fifteenth century. Autumn is the harvest of grain, grapes, and the slow ageing wheels of Parmigiano Reggiano.