[1] The tradition asserts that a breach opened in the banks of the Adige at Cucca, nowadays Veronella, about 35 km SE of Verona.
[2] Contemporary historians think that the breach never really happened, and the tradition simply refers to the disasters due to the lack of maintainment of the streams that followed the fall of the Roman Empire.
[citation needed] The Lombards did not repair the banks, and the waters of the Adige had been let free to flow through the lower Veneto for centuries,[2] in order to set a swamp on the borders with the Exarchate of Ravenna.
Even though the dates do not exactly align, it is a fact that in that century there was at least "one year without summer", it is conceivable that the exceptionally bad weather conditions reported worldwide for that unknown year, whose consequences included skipped harvests and famine in places as far apart as Ireland, Scandinavia and China, constitute the real background also for this reported climate disaster.
The Tartaro river contributed to the swamp;[2] as the land dried up, some villages started to be set around its course: they were the first hamlets of Lendinara, Villanova del Ghebbo, Rovigo and Villadose.