Narses arrives in Venetia and discovers that a powerful Gothic-Frank army (fifty thousand men), under joint command of the kings Totila and Theudebald, blocks the principal route to the Po Valley.
Not wishing to engage such an formidable force and confident that the Franks would avoid a direct confrontation, Narses skirts the lagoons along the Adriatic shore by using vessels to leapfrog his army from point to point along the coast.
In this way, …
