Adria is a town and comune in the province of Rovigo in the Veneto region of northern Italy, situated between the mouths of the rivers Adige and Po.

[4] The first settlements built in the area are of Venetic origin, during the twelfth to ninth centuries BC, consisting of stilt houses in the wetlands, that were then still close to the sea.

The Villanovan culture, named for an archaeological site at the village of Villanova, near Bologna (Etruscan Felsina), flourished in this area from the tenth until as late as the sixth century BC.

The Etruscan-controlled area of the Po Valley was generally known as Padanian Etruria,[6] as opposed to their main concentration along the Tyrrhenian coast south of the Arno.

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".

It finally declined after the total change of the local hydrography in 589, following the catastrophic flood documented by Paul the Deacon,[12] and Adria became a fief of the archdiocese of Ravenna.