Georgiana thought about it. Bessières had also been a gendarme, yet he had never reminded her of Mussolini.
When she had planned to buy a house in Italy in the twentieth century, a real estate agent had shown her a Fascist house. It was in good condition, but no one would buy it no matter how cheap it was.
She shook her head and recorded what she had seen today. Her memory was poor; who knew when she might forget it?
There had never been a fixed crossing point on the Po River. Bonaparte had not brought materials for building pontoon bridges on either of his two crossings of the Alps. When he chose to cross at Piacenza in 1797, some had commented that he should not cross there. They all had their own views and tactical considerations, but she wondered whether they had investigated whether the places they considered feasible actually had the conditions for building bridges, including hydrology and construction materials.
The Po River's flood season lasted as long as nine months. Tributaries originating in the Alps poured melted glaciers and snowmelt into the Po River in late spring and early summer. By summer, floods caused by torrential rain created new flood crests. The two regulated each other, giving the Po River a long high-water season. Its low-water season appeared only in late summer and early autumn, and it was navigable below Turin.
The place she had just gone to see had a thirteen-span brick-and-stone bridge. It stood in the outskirts, separated from the city by a ring of fortifications. Those forts and gates had all been demolished, their stone used to repair the bridge piers. With five spans, the distance between the piers would be wider. Steel structures would also be lighter than stone, and the height