One hundred deaths and an exodus of displaced persons that does not stop: thus the flood of the river marked the region, and Italy, a few years after the end of the nightmare of the war
L’water always rose. The whole group was in the truck. I was a little higher because I was on the bank. I held three of my children with my left arm, and my wife with the other daughter on my shoulders, on the other side. The water came, continued to rise, was almost in the throat. I continued to hold tight … Many hours have passed … Everyone was crying. I couldn’t resist anymore. But I couldn’t make up my mind to leave this or that arm that would go under my children and my wife. I couldn’t make up my mind ….
Until Giovanni Bellinello, as he told L’Unit days later, he could no longer resist standing there on the floor, leaning against the cabin of the old 1937 Alfa Romeo 85 / C which had already waged a war and 14 changes of ownership before the water blocked his engine that night on one of the many Polesine straights in Frassinelle. He lacked strength. He gave in: I thought I’d all unite and go under all together…. And together they went under, into the water that swallowed the truck up to the roof, his wife Valentina, five children, his brother Mario, his wife Nazzarena and their children and other fathers, other mothers, other children for a total of eighty-four people. Most of the victims of the flood, about a hundred …
He, Giovanni Bellinello, carried away exhausted by the current, found himself clinging to a bale of straw, knocked against a willow, finally collected half-unconscious by a rescue boat. Alive, but broken inside forever. With the Magone of having made a mistake in leaving the house where they were refugees to get all, crowded beyond belief, on that truck requisitioned by the prefect to distribute food and now directed to Rovigo, but immediately blocked by the water. In vain, years later Pietro Radius wrote about Famiglia Cristiana, the owner of the vehicle Attilio Baccaglini blew the horn until the battery resisted. In vain did someone light a torch with a shirt immersed in the tank. No one could come to the rescue. Worse still: no one knew. As the water rose, a very cold and dirty water, someone, especially children and the elderly, died, Gian Antonio Cibotto in the amazing Flood Chronicles
picking up the words of a surviving friend: It was a death always the same, silent: a gush of blood from the mouth and then away, carried away by the current. The bodies disappeared, reappeared, disappeared forever again ….
Era the night between 14 and 15 November 1951. And that tragedy of the truck of death, inside the Po flood, the most serious of all time, was for the whole of Italy, which had emerged from the war only six years earlier, the traumatic interruption of a dream. That of years that are finally peaceful and open to a better future. The photos of the time say it all: a village festival, a pole of the cuccagna, a race with the feet in a sack and they were all cheerful. Even in that Polesine sunk in poverty.
Between the mouth of the Po di Levante and that of the Po di Goro, writes the agricultural engineer Alfredo De Polzer in a 1950 report, the year before the flood, there are a dozen villages all belonging to a few landowners, where the six thousand inhabitants have nothing, they live in buildings without bricks, except for a hearth and chimney, that is enclosures closed with poles and covered with reed, called casoni, usually divided into two rooms without flooring; while on the outside the walls are plastered with lime, on the inside they are covered with sheets of illustrated newspapers. More: In the winter season the houses are surrounded by mud in which it often sinks up to the knee …. An average of four live in each room but often eight, women give birth on average 9 or 10 times but cases of 18 births are not rare even if many of the children die infants, they drink water from the canals, eat what they fish and the rice of the owner’s paddy fields where everyone has worked since nine years up while children, even those at a very tender age, are left to fend for themselves and 90% illiteracy …
on this grieving humanity that in that November of ’51 the great flood rushes. The Venetians knew how dangerous the Po could be. And in 1600, fearing that the river after the Ferrara earthquake would push too far north, they had decided to bleed it as it should be done to a sick body, which to heal it should be a diversion from the overabundant moods. Four years of work and, with the favor of the Lord God, the cut wide at the beginning 167 meters, was already finished. And for three and a half centuries, as explained by Professor Fabio Luino, one of the leading experts on the subject, author of the essay The historic floods of the Po river (in Italy of disasters, edited by Emanuela Guidoboni and Gianluca Valensise, Bononia University Press, 2014), really avoided most of the disasters. That autumn month, for …
In five days, from 8 to 12 November 1951, over the entire Po basin about 17 billion cubic meters of water fell, equal to the amount that usually falls in six months, they write The flood: the Polesine and Italy in 1951 (Metauro, 2014) the historians Mihran Tchaprassian and Paolo Sorcinelli, added to this already considerable mass of water the abundant rainfall that had hit the same area in August and the previous October, and which had reduced the soil absorption. Not only that, the subsidence had caused a lowering of the seabed of the Delta, aggravated starting from the Thirties by the extraction of methane water underground.
Fact that when the great flood broke the banks in Occhiobello, explains Luino, about 100,000 hectares of land were flooded, two thirds of the province, with heights varying around 2 meters with peaks up to 5-6. AND no less than 8 billion cubic meters of water flooded the Polesine. An area larger than Lake Geneva, denounce the International Red Cross. Almost double.
There was no TV yet but the front pages of the newspapers and the newsreel footage, now available to everyone thanks to the archive of the Istituto Luce, stuck in everyone’s eyes and memory. Families bundled up on the roofs of houses. The cat at the top of a tree. The epic chronicles on Paride Fabbris, who from Arqu Polesine without hesitation, he plunged into the freezing, carrion-strewn water and swam away to raise the alarm in Rovigo. And then the woman busy boiling a drowned chicken broth on the embankment. The roaring cows yanked away with their heads on the surface of the water. The limping arrival of President Einaudi. And the firefighters, brigades, policemen and carabinieri and volunteers involved in an extraordinary rescue operation and consolidation of the embankments …
It was Italy that, after the poisoned civil war after the world conflict, rediscovered the need to be together. Start over. Restart. Not everyone could do it there, in Polesine. Having lost everything, at least 116,569 Polesani were forced to leave for good fortune elsewhere. Above all by remaining tied to their river, but in the parts where the Po originates, in Piedmont. Many have established themselves, others less so. Everyone is full of nostalgia. Even those who, like Galliano Dalpasso, by Lama Polesine, with mustaches and straw hats pressed on their heads, have memories of hunger: I remember a cow that died, they said, of diphtheria. The vet ordered her to be cut down and buried. In reality, the meat was sold under the counter. And the head buried in our dunghill. The night for my dad Felicino came to wake me up: “Shhh! Don’t make a noise, get up, give me a hand ” She pulled her head out of the manure, gave it a good wash with my mom, and put it in the pot. It was Easter Eve 1955. And that was our Easter. Misery it was. A lot. Seventy years later the Polesani are still fewer than they were the night the Po traded them.
Cibotto’s book is back in the library
We arrive within sight of the river. It looks like the sea. It runs slow, swollen, earthy, taking with it thousands of wrecks that come to collide with the shore, spinning like tops. In the days of the flood of 1951, Gian Antonio Cibotto (Rovigo, 1925-2017), journalist and critic, in the Polesine: he will tell the tragedy in a book, Cronache of the flood, which marks his literary debut, in 1954. A diary which La nave di Teseo will be returning to bookstores from 11 November in a new edition enriched by texts by Gian Antonio Stella, Cesare De Michelis, Vittorio Sgarbi and Elisabetta Sgarbi (pp. 144, euro 16). The release marks the start of the republication of Cibotto’s works. In addition to Polesine, says Elisabetta Sgarbi, Cibotto has done a lot for literature. Forgetting it would be like losing a part of us.
November 9, 2021 (change November 9, 2021 | 21:05)
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