Between Bologna and the Porretta Pass. Before the autostrada came bounding over the torrents on concrete stilts the smooth-flowing Reno (Italian for ‘Rhine’) provided southbound travellers with a dramatic introduction to the high Apennines. The old road winds but is nowhere steep. You pass through small spa townships, hardly known to the world. Here is San Pellegrino and, across the watershed, Porretta Terme, a climatic station with wells. Ten km south of Bologna the spread of yellow farm-like buildings is Sasso Marconi, where the inventor of wireless telegraphy was born. The next village going south is Marzabotto, where the discovery of an Etruscan necropolis is transforming scholars’ ideas about that enigmatic race.