"Do not move Camarina!" Italian wetlands from reclamation to restoration

Wetlands have been, throughout the centuries, even the millennia, the sacrificial scapegoat of the European landscape – a “landscapegoat”, as Giblett brilliantly named it. Expelled from the horizons of western space, most wetland areas of Europe began to know the fate of drainage since the late Middle Ages. Also in virtue of the more effective technologies available, the practice of land reclamation eventually witnessed its historical apex in the course of the 1900s, and to such extents that, by now, swamps and marshes have come to constitute true ecological rarities within the Western European environment. The second part of the last century, however, also happened to attend a curious and rather radical veer in attitudes towards wetlands, whereby the latter ones, also in virtue of improved ecological understanding of their virtues and importance, got to be progressively revaluated, and to even be considered among the earth’s most fundamental ecosystems. Following such developments, concrete actions and plans to preserve the few remaining marshes, and even engage with the restoration of those that had previously been deleted, have begun to spread internationally and rapidly grow in popularity. Italy can safely be seen as a paradigmatic example of similar events. The history, even starting with the Roman colonization, of land reclamation across the peninsula – and the Po Plain in particular – surely stands out as one of the richest and most intense we have record of. Furthermore, land reclamation in Italy was ever associated with more than just economical productivity. The country’s roots in Catholic monasticism, its role – since the renaissance and through the work of such figures as Galileo – as a primary cradle and breeding ground for the modern science of hydraulics, and its ever-lasting agricultural vocation, have all contributed to load the local history of drainages and reclamations with additional symbolism, facets, and complexity. Not the least, land reclamation revealed, for centuries, as perhaps one of the most prominent means of political control and organization of the Italian territory. The v significance of the Italian case has certainly not decreased with the eventual end, due to saturation, of the practice of wetlands drainage. On the contrary, at least in some ways, the country has – in the two last decades – newly proposed itself at the forefront of water management and governance. In this sense, then, we can conclude that, as much as wetlands – in virtue of their shifting significations and role for human communities – constitute an ideal and most profound subject for the study of humanenvironmental relations, Italy represents an optimal and most appropriate site for the study of wetlands throughout history. Based on Italy itself – and, more precisely, the already-mentioned Po Plain – the genesis of the work here presented has been twofold. On the one hand, it was conceived as a thesis in fulfilment of the requirements for a Degree of Master of Arts in Anthropology. On the other one, it was explicitly thought from the outset as a contribution to Prof. Gísli Pálsson’s own comparative research on Icelandic wetlands. In virtue of this latter aspect, the study was undertaken as to come to represent a general and yet informative introductory outlook on the complex and multilayered cultural history of Italian wetlands – from the reclamations of the past, until the developments of the present. The idea of being somehow part of a wider context, and the mission to provide a broad and sufficiently exhaustive insight into a subject which, on the contrary, revealed itself as being overwhelmingly elusive and vast, informed this work structurally, from its very inception. We are aware that, for that sake and purpose, not little had to be sacrificed in terms of local perspectives and specificity. We hope, nonetheless, to have sufficiently counterbalanced that loss, by gaining at least as much on other sides of the inquiry