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Reviewed by:
  • Acque di Terraferma: il Padovano [Inland Waters: The Padua Province] ed. by Pedro Garcia Duarte and Yann Giraud
  • Roberta Biasillo (bio)
Acque di Terraferma: il Padovano [Inland Waters: The Padua Province] Edited by Lucia Masotti. Venice: Marsilio, 2019. Pp. 152.

Public and scholarly debates on environmental management generally stem from extreme climate events. Indeed, this volume is the result of a collaborative project between a local authority, the Veneto Region, and academia, the University of Verona, in the aftermath of a flood. The event triggering the contributions collected in Acque di Terraferma is the so-called "Ognissanti flood." Starting on October 31, 2010, the north-eastern provinces of Italy were hit by a combination of intense precipitations and sirocco winds that melted fresh snow and overwhelmed the complex hydrological network. By November, several rivers had inundated an area of 140 square kilometers, affecting 130 municipalities; thousands of people were temporarily displaced. This event triggered an innovative approach to studying the relationship between waters, lowlands, and highlands, as well as the communities in the provinces of Vicenza and Padua. The outcome of the research was two edited volumes, one on Vicenza and the other on Padua (the focus of this book review).

From a historical perspective, the above-mentioned extreme event is all but new for Northeastern Italy, but the novelty that Lucia Masotti, Vantini Sandra, and their research team introduce is the role given to methodologies and sources belonging to the humanities and social sciences, and specifically to the contribution of historical cartography. The active role of the humanities in the search for more virtuous balances between humans and nature, waters and lands is endorsed and stated in the Italian legislative [End Page 540] measures regulating territorial planning activities and the preservation of the material cultural heritage. Building on these legislative measures, two contributions by Luigi Turri make the case that, especially in Italy, historical and archaeological knowledge represents an essential element to understand the complex and nonlinear dynamics of human settlements and agrarian transformations in creating flood-prone environments. Moreover, in a context of public interventions, preventive archaeology has the purpose to detect and undertake the scientific study of archaeological remains that might otherwise be destroyed by land development work.

The argument of the volume—and the collaborative project behind it—is that past environmental management strategies matter to the elaboration of innovative technical mitigation and adaptation strategies. This volume provides local institutions governing the environment with a ready-to-use database of historical documents and archaeological evidence containing relevant pieces of information for urban and rural planning. Digital tools and the Geographical Information System software play a key role allowing for the representation of diachronic and multidisciplinary data sets in already existing maps. The volume engages with an extremely relevant scholarship on risk management, and especially on the nexus between water and land management in the Veneto Region that has proved to be one of the most wide-ranging historiographical debates within and beyond the Italian environmental and agricultural historiography and Science and Technology Studies, many of which are listed in the bibliography. These studies operate at the interface between scholarly research, environmental policy, and public debate.

The authors help unsettle the historically constructed view of water and land as separated entities, and the title of the volume—literally Water of Stable Lands—stresses that water and land are factors working together in combination instead. Consequently, nowadays the region can be successfully managed only through an innovative approach inclusive of spaces where water and land coexist. In particular, Matteo Proto's chapter offers a longue durée overview of the environmental transformation of the area where the municipalities of Megliadino San Vitale and Vighizzolo d'Este are located. In the sixteenth century, the newly established Venetian authorities inaugurated policies of territorial management and economic development based on land value and agricultural exploitation. These policy choices led to a decline of water-based sectors, such as maritime trade and fisheries, and kept being implemented with several reclamation projects up until the end of the twentieth century. Despite the adoption of powerful technological fixes and the building of water infrastructures to keep water separated from land, even recently...

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