Piemonte

Italian Piemonte combines pie (from Latin pes, pedis, "foot") and monte (from Latin mons, montis, "mountain"). It means "at the foot of the mountain." The region in northwestern Italy earned the name from its position at the base of the western Alps. Turin, its capital, sits where the Po River emerges from the Alpine foothills onto the flat plain of the Po Valley.

English borrowed the word in the 17th century, initially as the proper name for the Italian region. By the 18th century, geographers were using it generically: any gently sloping area between mountains and a coastal plain was a piedmont. The word became a category. The Appalachian Piedmont stretches from New Jersey to Alabama—a broad plateau between the Appalachian Mountains and the Atlantic Coastal Plain.

In geology, a piedmont glacier is one that spreads out at the foot of a mountain range, forming a wide lobe on flatter ground. The Malaspina Glacier in Alaska, larger than the state of Rhode Island, is the classic example. Piedmont alluvial fans, piedmont lakes, and piedmont surfaces all describe features created where steep terrain meets level ground. The word names a universal geographic relationship.

The American Piedmont region shaped Southern history. Its red clay soil supported tobacco and cotton plantations. The fall line—where the Piedmont drops to the Coastal Plain—created rapids that powered early mills, and cities grew at these spots: Richmond, Raleigh, Columbia, Augusta. The geographic feature named by an Italian word determined where millions of Americans would live.