What has always intrigued me of the plains is the apparent homogeneity of the space, essentially bi-dimensional. Diversely from the rest of Italy (and Europe, with very few exceptions), where hills and mountains domain the landscape, the Po plain is a huge flat place not constrained by the caprices of the Earth’s crust.
I like to imagine the plain as a canvas where people of all epochs have been designing their own world in the way they shaped it into their minds. It may be seen as an authentic tension towards the utopia, since there is no other natural obstacle to the realization of the ideas, if not man himself, with his physical and intellectual limits. Not by accident, this is the place where the Italian Renaissance architects have experienced the building of the “ideal city“, such as Palmanova, Sabbioneta, or Terra del Sole close to Forlì.
To a certain extent, here nature has been domesticated. The channel system provides prevention to floods and drought, as well as a fast and straightforward route to the main rivers, and finally to the Adriatic sea. Frequent earthquakes remain a problem, still far beyond any human control.
A brief tour of the countryside could easily reveal how space is organized to maximize the agricultural surplus. Regular plots of land, a legacy of the Roman centuriation, leave no space to wild, uncultivated areas. At the same time, perfectly straight roads ensure easy and quick connections between settlements and improve trade and networks.
For a researcher interested in the social history, the opportunity to study a place like this is unique. The successes and failures of the past societies, here, cannot be attributed to other than the strategies they pursued. External influences, of course, could intervene positively or negatively, but their consequences, whatever they were, mattered in the short term, rather than in the long durée.
Along with its physiological uniformity, the central part of the Po plain displays a considerable degree of cultural identity. The area enclosed between Mantova and Verona in the north and Reggio Emilia and Modena in the south appears particularly homogeneous from the point of view of the dialect, customs, and tradition, in spite of the little local adaptions. Take the cuisine, for example, a very popular aspect of culture in these places. Although everyone claims for the invention of a certain speciality (with endless debates), the recipes are definitely not so different.
Variations nonetheless exist, especially when we look at the events that took place in the two areas, north and south of the Po river, from prehistory to the present days. Here we are forced to make distinctions and to observe different historical trajectories.
With the Ex-SPACE project, we are looking at the dawn of the plain as we know it. We have to go back to the Bronze Age and to the Terramare culture. But we need to wait a bit… this will be the topic of our next tale.
Ex-SPACE 