Padania

Padania is an alternative name for the Po Valley, a major plain in the north of Italy. The term was sparingly used until the early 1990s, when Lega Nord, a federalist and, at times, separatist political party in Italy, proposed "Padania" as a possible name for an independent state in Northern Italy. Since then, it has carried strong political connotations.

The adjective padano, derived from Padus, the Latin name of the Po river, was first used in the 19th century. In its true geographical sense, Padania refers to the valley of the Po river. In fact, the French client republics in the Po Valley during the Napoleonic era included the Cispadane Republic and the Transpadane Republic, according to the custom (emerged with the French Revolution) of naming territories on the basis of watercourses. The ancient Regio XI (the region of the Roman Empire on the current territory of the Aosta Valley, Piedmont and Lombardy) has been thus referred to as Regio XI Transpadana in academic literature only in recent centuries.

The term Padania has been used mainly as a socio-economic denomination as the terms Pianura Padana or Val Padana are the standard denominations in geography textbooks and atlases. The first use of the concept in socio-economic terms dates from 1975, when Guido Fanti, the Communist President of Emilia-Romagna, proposed a union composed of Emilia-Romagna, Veneto, Lombardy, Piedmont and Liguria. The term was seldom used in these terms until the Giovanni Agnelli Foundation re-launched it in 1992 through the volume La Padania, una regione italiana in Europa (English: Padania, an Italian region in Europe), written by various academics.

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