Territory
"A burning sun hammers down on people's brains in summer and fog envelopes the world and erases it just a stone's throw away from people's noses, during autumn..
Here even dogs have souls, and you may happen to encounter the ghost of a dead man who stops and talks to you at a crossroads. "
(G. Guareschi)
The LIFE-RINASCE project covers the lowland portion of the Po Valley, enclosed between the provinces of Reggio Emilia and Modena south of the Po River, crossed by a dense network of century-old man-built canals intended for land reclamation purposes : today waters flow through this artificial network not only by gravity, but also thanks to draining pumps that allow the drainage of soils placed below hanging riverbeds.
The current spatial layout results in fact from century-old activities that have progressively transformed the landscape and the environment, shaped by the ongoing transformation of natural watercourses over millennia, characterized in its original dynamics, by the alternation of crests (signs of ancient yet now abandoned riverbeds) and more depressed and flat lowlands, periodically flooded during floods or characterized by vast wetlands and swamps.
The progressive expansion of agricultural activities is at the basis of land reclamation (developed since the mid-nineteenth century).
The drainage network, therefore, plays an important role today in hydraulic control, having consequently replaced the natural drainage in many areas, thus being the main environmental highlight linked to water.
All this, associated with urban sprawl, which has taken place throughout the second half of the twentieth century, has then led to a high environmental and hydraulic risk affecting the mid-low plains of the Region.