Rafting on the Adige in Verona: yes, you can do it right in the city

Imagine gliding across the water beneath Ponte Pietra, the Roman bridge that has stood for two thousand years. Watching the facades of medieval palaces rise beyond the banks, the Scaligeri tower cut sharply against the sky, the city revealing itself slowly from a perspective almost nobody ever gets. All of this while sitting in a rubber dinghy, paddle in hand, floating down the Adige through the heart of Verona.

Rafting in Verona is not an attraction built for tourists. It is an experience that exists because the river exists, because it has always existed, because for centuries it was the true backbone of the city. And travelling it today means understanding Verona in a way no walking tour can replicate.

The Adige: Verona’s original builder

Before the Arena, before the Scaligeri, before Romeo and Juliet, there was the river. The Adige literally built Verona: it is its characteristic meander, the double curve that embraces the historic centre, that made this point on the Po plain naturally defensible and therefore inhabited since antiquity.

But the Adige was not only a defence. For centuries it was the main communication route of the entire region: navigable all the way to Trento, it connected Verona with the Alps to the north and with Venice and the Adriatic to the south. Goods floated downstream on flat-bottomed barges called ‘tanse’, the same craft that medieval merchants used to transport timber, wool and spices. The Scaligeri city statutes even regulated river traffic: boatmen were required to call out three times before every bend in the river to warn those sailing further downstream.

By the nineteenth century, more than four hundred floating mills were operating along the banks of the Adige within the city limits. There were shipyards, small workshops, goods depots and water-lifting machines. The Filippini district — which the dinghy passes through during the descent — was the commercial heart of Verona’s river port, home to the River Customs House where goods were taxed before entering or leaving the city.

1882: the year the river took the city back

The relationship between Verona and its river was not always peaceful. On 17 September 1882, the Adige burst its banks at multiple points and submerged more than two thirds of the city. Boats could not pass under the arches of Porta Borsari. At Ponte Pietra the water had reached four and a half metres above the warning mark, with the current running at twenty kilometres an hour.

It was the most devastating flood in Verona’s modern history, but not the first: carved into the facade of the Church of Santo Stefano is a graffito recording the flood of 1195; a fresco at San Zeno commemorates that of 1239. In the Filippini district, as the dinghy passes by, you can still see plaques on the palace walls marking the levels reached by historic floods.

The 1882 disaster marked the end of one Verona and the beginning of another. Within a few years the city built the high embankment walls that still contain the river today — the same walls that, walking along the Lungadige, seem almost designed to hide it. And in 1959 the Adige-Garda Tunnel was completed: a drainage channel several kilometres long that, in the event of a flood, diverts excess water into Lake Garda. In sixty years it has been used only thirteen times.

Eight and a half kilometres of history

So can you do rafting on the Adige? With us, yes. The route covers 8.5 kilometres of the river’s urban stretch, from the Chievo area to the Boschetto landing. It is a calm descent — the river presents no technically demanding rapids in this section — but rich in perspectives that are simply invisible from the banks.

Each dinghy carries ten to twelve people and is steered by a certified F.I.Raft river guide — the Italian Rafting Federation — with experience gained on some of Italy’s most demanding waterways.

Three stops punctuate the descent. One of the most interesting is at the Venetian River Customs House in the Filippini district, where the Museo dell’Adige is housed: one of Verona’s least visited but most fascinating places, telling the story of the city’s river history through documents, instruments and traces of the old merchant port.

What you see from the river that you cannot see from the bank

The view from the water transforms the city entirely. The historic bridges, seen from below, reveal proportions and details invisible from the road. Ponte Pietra, the oldest in Verona, shows its original Roman structure from beneath, including the famous ‘cat’s eyes’ — the holes on the left side that were used to anchor the ropes that hauled boats upstream against the current, exactly as they did in antiquity.

Medieval palace facades emerge unexpectedly above the banks, the riverside vegetation creates a vivid green contrast with the city’s stone, and in certain stretches the city disappears entirely, replaced by a quiet natural corridor that makes it easy to forget you are floating through the centre of an urban area.

Throughout the journey, the river guides describe the history of Verona’s waterway: the role of the mills, the floods, the hydraulic defence system, the river’s ancient commercial function. It is a reading of the city that layers onto the artistic and literary one, revealing a stratum of history that usually remains invisible.