Piedmont

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

• A historical region of northwest Italy bordering on France and Switzerland. Occupied by Rome in the 2nd century BC, it passed to Savoy in the 11th century and was the center of the Italian Risorgimento after 1814.
• A plateau region of the eastern United States extending from New York to Alabama between the Appalachian Mountains and the Atlantic coastal plain.

from The Century Dictionary.

• noun In physical geography, a district lying along or near the foot of a mountain-range, like the plain of northwestern Italy near the Alps: applied, for example, to the rolling land next east of the Blue Ridge in Virginia, called sometimes the Piedmont Plain.
• Having the physical character of a piedmont or its relations to a mountain-range: as, a piedmont region or district.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

• adjective (Geol.) Noting the region of foothills near the base of a mountain chain.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

• proper noun Region in the north of Italy.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

• noun the plateau between the coastal plain and the Appalachian Mountains: parts of Virginia and North and South Carolina and Georgia and Alabama
• noun the region of northwestern Italy; includes the Po valley
• noun a gentle slope leading from the base of a mountain to a region of flat land