Ancient era The first
settlements built in the area are of
Venetic origin, during the twelfth to ninth centuries BC, consisting of stilt houses in the wetlands, that were then still close to the sea. At that time the main stream of the Po, the
Adria channel, flowed into the sea in this area. The
Villanovan culture, named for an archaeological site at the village of Villanova, near Bologna (Etruscan
Felsina), flourished in this area from the tenth until as late as the sixth century BC. The foundations of classical Atria are dated from 530 to 520 BC. The Etruscans built the port and settlement of Adria after the channel gradually started to run dry. During the later period of the sixth century BC the port continued to flourish. The Etruscan-controlled area of the Po Valley was generally known as
Padanian Etruria, as opposed to their main concentration along the
Tyrrhenian coast south of the
Arno. Greeks from
Aegina and later from
Syracuse by
Dionysius I colonised the city making it into an
emporion. Greeks had been trading with the Veneti from the sixth century BC at least, especially the
amber, originally coming from the Baltic sea. Mass
Celtic incursions into the Po valley resulted in friction between the
Gauls and Etruscans and intermarriage, attested by
epigraphic inscriptions on which Etruscan and Celtic names appear together. The city was populated by Etruscans, Veneti, Greeks and Celts.
Pliny the Elder, a Roman author and fleet commander, wrote about a system of channels in Atria that was, "first made by the Tuscans [i.e. Etruscans], thus discharging the flow of the river across the marshes of the Atriani called the Seven Seas, with the famous harbor of the Tuscan town of Atria which formerly gave the name of Atriatic to the sea now called the Adriatic". Those "Seven Seas" were interlinked coastal lagoons, separated from the open sea by sand spits and
barrier islands. The Etruscans extended this natural inland waterway with new canals to extend the navigation possibilities of the tidal reaches of the Po all the way north to Atria. As late as the time of the emperor Vespasian, shallow draft galleys could still be rowed from
Ravenna into the heart of Etruria. Under Roman occupation the town ceded importance to
Ravenna as the continued
siltation of the Po delta carried the seafront further to the east. The sea is now about from Adria. The first exploration of ancient Atria was carried out by
Carlo Bocchi and published as
Importanza di Adria la Veneta. The collections of the Bocchi family were given to the public at the beginning of the 20th century and comprise a major part of the city museum collection of antiquities. There are several ideas concerning the etymology of the ancient
toponym Adria/Atria. One theory is that it derives from the
Illyrian (
Venetic language) word
adur "water, sea".
Medieval and modern age At the time of the fall of the
Western Roman Empire, the port of Adria had lost most of its importance. It finally declined after the total change of the local hydrography in 589, following the catastrophic flood documented by
Paul the Deacon, and Adria became a fief of the
archdiocese of Ravenna. After a period as an independent commune, it was a possession of the
Este of
Ferrara and, in the 16th century, of the
Republic of Venice. At that time Adria was a small village surrounded by
malaria-plagued marshes. It recovered its importance when
Polesine was reclaimed in the same century. During the
Napoleonic Wars it was first under France, then under
Austria, to which it was assigned in 1815 after the
Congress of Vienna, as part of
Lombardy-Venetia. ==Notable people==