Word of the Day
TIBER (TY-buhr)
A river of central Italy
Common clues: River of Rome; Rome’s river
Crossword puzzle frequency: once a year
Frequency in English language: 54146 / 86800
Video: Ponte Milvio
The Tiber (Latin Tiberis, Italian Tevere) is the third-longest river in Italy, rising in the Apennine mountains of Tuscany and flowing 406 kilometres through Umbria and Lazio to the Tyrrhenian Sea. It drains a basin estimated at 18,000 km². The river has achieved lasting fame as the main watercourse of the city of Rome, founded on its eastern banks.
Ponte
Milvio over the Tiber.
There are on the Tiber — in addition to numerous modern bridges — several ancient bridges (now mostly pedestrian-only) that survived in part (e.g., the Milvian Bridge and the Ponte Sant'Angelo) or in whole (Fabricius' Bridge).
The river rises at Mount Fumaiolo in central Italy and flows in a generally southerly direction past Perugia and Rome to meet the sea at Ostia. Popularly called flavus ("the blond"), in reference to the yellowish colour of its water, the Tiber has heavily advanced at the mouth by about 3 km since Roman times, leaving the ancient port of Ostia Antica 6 km inland. However, it does not form a proportional delta, owing to a strong north-flowing sea current close to the shore, to the steep shelving of the coast, and to slow tectonic subsidence.
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Tiber".
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