Lombardy Geography

Lombardy is best understood as a slope. It falls from over 4,000 metres on the Swiss frontier to barely 100 metres at the Po, and almost everything about how it was settled and farmed follows from that gradient and the water running down it.

The Alps and the pre-Alps

The northern quarter is mountain. The Rhaetian Alps along the Swiss border include Lombardy's highest ground, reached through the Stelvio Pass at 2,757 m — one of the highest paved passes in the Alps, closed by snow through the winter. South of them the Orobie Alps separate the Valtellina from the valleys behind Bergamo and Brescia. These are working valleys, not wilderness: the Valtellina's south-facing slopes are terraced for vines up to around 800 m.

The lakes

The lakes occupy troughs cut by glaciers and dammed by their own moraines. That origin explains their shape — long, narrow and startlingly deep. Lake Como reaches about 410 m, among the deepest in Europe, and its inverted-Y form comes from two glacial branches meeting at Bellagio. Garda, shared with Veneto and Trentino, is the largest in Italy; Maggiore is shared with Piedmont and Switzerland; Iseo holds Monte Isola, the largest lake island in southern Europe.

The lakes moderate the climate around them enough to grow olives and lemons well north of where either should survive, which is why the shores were built up with villas and gardens from the 16th century onward.

The plain

South of a line through Milan the land flattens into the Po plain. Its fertility is partly natural and largely engineered: a dense network of irrigation canals, some medieval, distributes Alpine water across it. The Naviglio Grande, begun in the 12th century, brought water and stone to Milan and is still open. The rice fields of the Lomellina, west of Pavia, depend on the same system.

The plain's rivers — the Ticino, Adda, Oglio and Mincio — all run south into the Po, which forms the region's southern boundary.

Consequences

The enclosed basin that makes the plain fertile also traps its air: winter inversions hold pollution and fog in place for days. Flooding along the Po and its tributaries is a recurring risk, and the retreat of the Alpine glaciers that feed the system is reducing summer flow in a region whose agriculture was built around having enough of it.