Short answers, pulled from the story.
The name Lombardy once covered all of Northern Italy, stretching from the Alps to the Po River and beyond. Ancient maps showed this vast territory included areas that today belong to different regions like Emilia-Romagna and Liguria.
By the 1400s, the region known as Greater Lombardy had lost its eastern territories. Political changes shrank this concept significantly over centuries before modern administrative borders defined a much smaller area.
Piedmont developed distinct traditions separate from the rest of the north after the House of Savoy established their capital at Turin in the early modern period. By the 1600s, a substantial partition existed between Lombardy and Piedmont with divergent local laws and governance structures.
Dante Alighieri recognized the autonomy of Romagna and Genoa as entities outside of Lombardy in his famous literary works. He acknowledged that cities like Bologna and Florence had their own unique character independent of northern unity.
Place names across Italy still reflect the ancient concept of Greater Lombardy today including Massa Lombarda within modern Romagna. Reggio di Lombardia stands in Emilia where locals now call it Reggio nell'Emilia despite administrative changes since unification.