Pliny the Elder, a Roman author and fleet commander, wrote about a system of channels in Atria that was, “first made by the Tuscans [i.e. Etruscans], thus discharging the flow of the river across the marshes of the Atriani called the Seven Seas, with the famous harbor of the Tuscan town of Atria which formerly gave the name of Atriatic to the sea now called the Adriatic.” Those “Seven Seas” were interlinked coastal lagoons, separated from the open sea by sand pits and barrier islands.[10] The Etruscans extended this natural inland waterway with new canals to extend the navigation possibilities of the tidal reaches of the Po all the way north to Atria. As late as the time of the emperor Vespasian, shallow draft galleys could still be rowed from Ravenna into the heart of Etruria.