You slide out of Venice's quiet canals into low, wind-bent marshland, the lagoon loosening its hold and the road unspooling east toward Ravenna. The transfer unfolds like a corridor through Emilia-Romagna's flatlands: salt pans give way to the broad, slow rivers of the Po Delta and a ribbon of highway that carries you to the Romanesque campanile of the Abbey of Pomposa. For two hours you leave the car and step into cool stone and frescoed silence — a place whose belltower once listened to medieval pilgrims and whose cloister still channels the slow rhythm of monastic life.