Weather Forecast in Mantova City

Mantua (Italian: Mantova [ˈmantova] ( ); Emilian and Latin: Mantua) is a city and comune in Lombardy, Italy, and capital of the province of the same name.

In 2007 Mantua's centro storico (old town) and Sabbioneta were been 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. 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 place where the composer Monteverdi premiered his opera Orfeo ed Euridice and 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 was commemorated by a statue at the lakeside park "Piazza Virgilio".

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

The area and its environs are not only important 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), the Gallic phases (2nd-1st centuries BC), and ended with Roman residential settlements, which could be traced to the 3rd century AD.