Mantua, Lombardy, Italy

🇮🇹 Mantua, Italian Capital of Culture, European Capital of Gastronomy, World Heritage Site. Mantua (Mantova) is a city and comune in Lombardy, Italy, and capital of the province of the same name.

In 2016, Mantua was designated as the Italian Capital of Culture. In 2017, it was named as the European Capital of Gastronomy, included in the Eastern Lombardy District (together with the cities of Bergamo, Brescia, and Cremona).

In 2007, Mantua's centro storico (old town) and Sabbioneta were declared by UNESCO to be a World Heritage Site. Mantua's historic power and influence under the Gonzaga family has made it one of the main artistic, cultural, and especially musical hubs of Northern Italy and the country as a whole. Having one of the most splendid courts of Europe of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and early seventeenth centuries. Mantua is noted for its significant role in the history of opera; the city is also known for its architectural treasures and artifacts, elegant palaces, and the medieval and Renaissance cityscape. It is the city where the composer Monteverdi premiered his opera L'Orfeo and to where Romeo was banished in Shakespeare's play Romeo and Juliet. It is the nearest town to the birthplace of the Roman poet Virgil, who is commemorated by a statue at the lakeside park "Piazza Virgiliana".

Mantua is surrounded on three sides by artificial lakes, created during the 12th century as the city's defence system. These lakes receive water from the Mincio River, a tributary of the Po River which descends from Lake Garda. The three lakes are called Lago Superiore, Lago di Mezzo, and Lago Inferiore ("Upper", "Middle", and "Lower" Lakes, respectively). A fourth lake, Lake Pajolo, which once served as a defensive water ring around the city, dried up at the end of the 18th century.

The area and its environs are important not only in naturalistic terms, but also anthropologically and historically; research has highlighted a number of human settlements scattered between Barche di Solferino and Bande di Cavriana, Castellaro and Isolone del Mincio. These dated, without interruption, from Neolithic times (5th–4th millennium BC) to the Bronze Age (2nd–1st millennium BC) and the Gallic phases (2nd–1st centuries BC), and ended with Roman residential settlements, which could be traced to the 3rd century AD.

In 2017, Legambiente ranked Mantua as the best Italian city for the quality of the life and environment.

Economy Mantua’s economy is primarily concerned with the processing and shipping of agricultural products. The city is a centre of road, rail, and water transportation and industry.

Despite Mantuan landscape is primarily an agricultural one and the primary sector accounted for the 6% of local GDP in 2003, much above Italian average, the province has an historically strong industrial sector, which accounts for 37% of the GDP, while the tertiary sector holds the remaining 56%. Overall, the gross domestic product of the province was estimated in 2003 at over €10 billion.

The productivity of agriculture is enhanced by a well-developed use of fertilizers and the traditional abundance of water. It is largely flat and the soil is very fertile and is intensively irrigated, boosted since the Middle Ages by the construction of a wide net of irrigation canals which were partly designed by Leonardo da Vinci. Crops grown include wheat, maize, rice, sugar beet, potatoes and vegetables. Olives, grapes, chestnuts and many other sorts of fruit are grown; mulberry plants are grown for their contribution to silk production, or sericulture. The lower plains are characterised by fodder crops, which are mowed up to eight times a year. Cattle are also bred and cheese and other dairy products are manufactured. The main exports from the province include cereals, rice, cheese and silk, but most industrial goods need to be imported.