Rivoli is a balcony. The village sits on a narrow plateau between the Adige, sunk in its gorge to the west, and the foothills of Monte Baldo to the east; the Austrian columns coming from the north had to debouch by narrow mountain tracks, unable to support one another. On 14 January 1797 that relief counted as much as the orders.
It is today one of the few Napoleonic sites that can still be read standing. Vines and olives have replaced the crops of the day, but the slopes, the defiles and the view over the valley are those of 1797. A commemorative obelisk crowns the plateau, and one grasps in a few minutes, without documentation, why an army arriving from the north lost its advantages there.
The victory earned the village an unexpected posterity. When Percier and Fontaine drove a great straight avenue along the Tuileries in 1802, it was named rue de Rivoli: today one of the best-known streets in Paris, and almost nobody connects it with this plateau in the Veneto.
The name also served as a title. Masséna, whose division was decisive that day, was made Duke of Rivoli in 1808 — one of the victory titles by which the Empire turned the geography of its campaigns into a nobility of state.
