 The city was populated by Etruscans, Veneti, Greeks and Celts.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.” Those “Seven Seas” were interlinked coastal lagoons, separated from the open sea by sand pits and barrier islands.