Bisogna dare la massima fecondità ad ogni zolla di terra (“Every clod of earth must be made given maximum fertility”). This sentence, pronounced by Mussolini in 1929, is still engraved in the façade of the local water board’s ex-headquarters of the town of Mogliano, about ten kilometres inland from Venice. In the region of Veneto, in North-eastern Italy, water boards like the aforementioned, locally known as consorzi di bonifica, are local institutions of farmers and other landowners interested in draining swamplands in favour of a maximisation of agricultural produce. Fascist propaganda tended to take the entire merits of this hydrological and agricultural endeavour. Nonetheless, the Veneto has experienced political utilisation of water management way before the Fascist Period and even the Unification. The Republic of Venice’s control of its mainland (Terraferma) in the 16th century also implied the gradual political subjugation of local farmers’ communitarian institutions, as well as the close monitorization of their activities by Venetian government officers, agrarian notaries and engineers. Local consorzi or farmers had to therefore ask for permission to the Venetian authorities for opening canals that brought water to arid lands or, in the contrary, drained swamps; they also had to inform the government in Venice about new elected presidents every six months as well as paying taxes for the building of hydraulic infrastructure. Therefore, this aggressive fiscalisation of water uses in service of a productive programme meant also the forging of a political narrative of Venetian state making: a Republic that not only governed the waters in the Adriatic, but also in its Italic inland territories. This presentation therefore attempts to problematise and give a longue durée historical perspective of how water control (drainage and irrigation), and landscape modification are not specific elements to contemporary Italy, but go back to pre-industrial political traditio
Samuel Barney Blanco
University of Padua – Ca’ Foscari University of Venice
ID Abstract: 686