Bocca d'Arno

This guide to Bocca d'Arno near Pisa opens with Ferdinando de' Medici deciding, in the early sixteen hundreds, that the marshy mouth of the Arno belonged elsewhere, and having it dug out and pushed about a mile and a half south. It follows the river's refusal to cooperate, from Michel de Montaigne's account of boats stuck on silted sandbars in fifteen eighty-one to the giant stilted nets, called retoni, that Pisan fishermen later rigged to work with the current instead of against it. The poet Gabriele D'Annunzio, who summered nearby, described those nets hanging like scales from the masts. Watch the water where river meets sea, still murky and restless today.