Quietly Flows The Po The Life And Slow Death Of Italy S Longest River Drought

Since it flows entirely within Italian territory – it rises a few hundred meters inside the Franco-Italian border in the Cottian Alps and heads east until it reaches the Adriatic Sea south of Venice – the Pano is part of the national psyche. The poet Guido Ceronetti once wrote: “You must understand the Po in order to understand Italy,” but now – as northern Italy faces its worst drought in 70 years – the river is also a prism through which to view its ecological emergency. country. In some places it has completely disappeared this summer. By Saluzzo, upstream of Turin, I walked from one bank to the other without getting my feet wet. There was only white gravel with buddleia where the ‘big river’ was supposed to be. The Podos has 141 tributaries, so further downstream the river returns. But two weeks ago, at the end of June, the flow measured at Pontelagoscuro, near Ferrara, fell below the average of 145 cubic meters per second (the historical average flow for June is 1,805 cubic meters per second). At Cremona – about halfway along the Po – the water is currently more than 8 meters (26 feet) below the “hydrographic zero”. On Monday, the Italian government declared a state of emergency in five northern regions – Emilia-Romagna, Lombardy, Piedmont, Veneto and Friuli Venezia Giulia. Power plants and spas have been shut down, decorative fountains in Milan have been shut down and daily tube bans have been put in place simply because water evaporates faster than it falls. map of the po river The Adriatic Sea has come about 12 miles inland from the mouth of the Po, burning crops and salting drinking water. Vast plantations of maize used for cattle feed are turning yellow. Hundreds of thousands of hectares along the Po basin are lying fallow this summer due to doubts about the reliability of irrigation for the “second planting”. The river is usually quite full in June due to snowmelt, but the Italian Society of Environmental Geology recorded only a third of the average snowfall last winter (2.5 meters instead of 7.5 meters). The Gran Paradiso peak (in Piedmont/Aosta) saw only 127cm (50in) of snowfall this winter, compared to this century’s average of 331cm. Even the glaciers are going: last Sunday seven people were killed when a section of the Marmolada glacier broke free, causing a hail of rocks and debris. Another 13, at the time of writing, are missing. Last week I went to Trentino, 2,200 meters above sea level, and the peaks around Folgarida and Madonna di Campiglio were stone, not white. It was so hot at altitude that most people only walked in vests. Poe tells many other stories about the consequences of human ingenuity and cunning. The river was, for millennia, a vital transport hub, part of the Baltic amber trade route in the Bronze Age. The Romans sailed up the Po from Adria (the city that gave its name to the sea) to their fortress at Turin. In the Middle Ages, dozens of rival states (baron states) fought over access to their banks to levy transit taxes and strengthen strategic defenses: the Panos was always a huge, waterlogged moat that invaders from the north, such as Hannibal, Attila or Barbarossa. , had to pass. So the river was built with brick castles, watchtowers, chains perpendicular to the flow and pumping stations. In the late 19th century, there were believed to be 300 flour mills on the river and dozens of bridges made up of barges tied together. The low water level of the Po can be seen on the Ponte Vecchio in San Mauro Torinese, Turin. Photo: Tobias Jones But when you row and paddle the Po now, its banks are deserted. I traveled from the delta to the source for nine months by canoe, bike, foot and car and it was an industrial rust belt. The discolored hoppers of the gravel pits and chimneys of the early 20th century brick kilns now crack and give way to gravity. Due to the floods of 1951, 80,000 people from Polesine – just inland from the delta – migrated elsewhere in the 1950s, and there are large houses throughout the area filled with ivy and fig trees. The castle in Stellata was cracked by the earthquake of 2012. Since you don’t see anyone all day, it feels like you’re visiting Earth after the humans are gone. The promise of silence and solitude was partly what drew me to the river in the first place. But I also wanted to understand the land where I live. My friends from La Bassa, the plains just north of Parma, describe the sanctity of the river almost paganistically: for them it is a hallowed vessel of folklore, legend and memory. They told me about mythological animals like Fozonko or villages where the socialist violinists had ended up and bought the farm of the local nobles. I followed the stories and slowly understood the feeling of losing my friends. The river wreckage was almost complete: paddling upstream, I saw plastic baling hay, a tennis ball, a Nerf gun bullet The river has always been both a giver and a thief, giving away land but also robbing. He is usually called a “traitor” or “indomitable” because he had a habit of leaving his established bed and changing course. Settlements that were once on the left bank are now on the right and vice versa. Near Valenza, there is a village called Alluvioni Cambiò (“changed by floods”). Freeing the river from silt even became an instrument of expansion: almost as soon as Este’s house in Ferrara was extinguished in 1597, the Venetian republic radically changed the direction of the Po (1600-04), forcing it south by a square mile cut so that the harbors of Ferrara to be silted up and the Venetians to be able to reclaim the land where the river once ran. The word for land reclamation, the draining of swamps and floodplains, is bonifiche, which means ‘to make good’. Industrialization meant coal pumping stations were capable of moving millions of gallons a day: by the 20th century, the number of valli – lagoons – had dropped from 50 to just 24. Between 1957 and 1975, 18,000 hectares (44,000 acres) of the lagoon disappeared. Mezzano. The removal of water meant that the new lands were often below the river level. The discovery of methane in the 1920s and its mining in the following decades meant that land levels dropped another vital meter or two. Water’s natural obedience to gravity has been challenged by human infamy. The mechanized riverbank was now needed to protect the hard-earned land because the Podos “climbed”, i.e. above the level of the surrounding countryside. In Polesine you go up the river, not down. Sophia Loren in the 1954 film The River Girl, set in the town of Comacchio, which was famous for its smoked eels before its fishermen were forced to turn to clam farming. Photo: Album/Alamy The clever fishermen of Comacchio once trapped and smoked eels (they were the subject of one of Sophia Loren’s early films, The River Girl), but eels became scarcer due to a lack of habitat, so the fishermen began farming clams, creating a industry in the post-war years worth around €100m (£86m) a year. White refrigerated trucks now ply the narrow roads in the delta, beginning their journeys to the restaurants and markets of Europe. Human intervention has turned the ecosystems upside down: the coypu was imported from South America for its fur, but when that industry ended, the food had no predators and happily multiplied. Now they gnaw on the banks for roots, graze among the gourds and melons, then drop into the water, gliding with their nostrils popping over the algae blooms. Every branch along the Po seemed to stain or change it. Its waters were used to cool power stations, so the red and white chimneys are often, along with pylons, the most important sights from the canoe. The star cucumber (known as zucca pazza or “crazy pumpkin”) was introduced from America to provide shade in Italian orchards, but the plant has gone rogue and now covers the flood plains like a lumpy silk carpet. The nasty catfish has almost completely wiped out the native sturgeon, a source of the once-prized Po caviar. Canada poplars were introduced and now stand like regimental troops, all parallel and vertical. The destruction of the river was almost total: as I paddled against the current, I memorized the objects I saw: plastic for baling hay, a tennis ball, a Nerf gun bullet. What I didn’t see was even more alarming: pollution has improved since its peak in the mid-1990s (when the ice was estimated to discharge into the Adriatic annually 2,642 kg of zinc, 1,154 kg of copper, 1,312 kg of lead, 944 kg of chromium and 243 kilograms of arsenic), but analysts still often see spikes in benzoylecgonine, a chemical excreted by cocaine users in their urine, after the weekends. During my trip the air quality was, if anything, even worse than the water. The polythene sky of the Padanian plain during winter is partly the result of dense fog, but these fogs also occur due to the habit of watering farmland with nitrogen fertilizers that then evaporate to form ammonium salts. Fertilizer runoff also causes these algal blooms due to eutrophication – which occurs when waters are over-enriched with nutrients and minerals, usually from agriculture – in our increasingly sluggish rivers. Most irrigation canals look like bowling creases. But just as I was beginning to despair of the ecological destruction of the river, something exciting and fascinating emerged. Because the earth…