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The site of Spina, the Etruscan port city on the Adriatic, at the ancient mouth of the Po south of the lagoon where Venice would one day rise, was lost until modern times, when drainage schemes in the delta of the Po in 1922 first officially revealed a necropolis of Etruscan Spina about four miles west of the commune of Comacchio. The fishermen of Comacchio, it soon turned out, had been the source of "Etruscan" vases (actually originally imported from Greece) and other artefacts that had appeared for years on the archeological black market. The archaeological finds from the burials of Spina, and from a second necropolis nearby, discovered in 1954, filled the collections of the archaeological museum at Ferrara, but the location of the city itself was discovered more recently, through aerial photography. Aside from the white reflective surfaces of the modern drainage channels there appeared in the photographs a ghostly network of dark lines and light rectangles, the dark lines indicating richer vegetation on the sites of ancient canals. Thus the layout of the ancient trading port was revealed, now miles from the sea, due to the sedimentation of the Po delta.
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