How Was The Po River Delta Built

What has been built here is a hydraulic machine. Embankments (argini) line every branch of the river; a dense network of drainage channels collects the water that seeps into land below sea level; and pumping stations lift it back into the river. Remove any part of it and most of the Polesine is under water within days.

Ca' Vendramin, built in 1903 and working until 1969, is the monument of this system: a brick hall of steam engines and pumps, now the regional reclamation museum, and a genuinely impressive piece of industrial architecture in a landscape with almost no other.

The villages -- Porto Tolle, Taglio di Po, Ariano, Porto Viro -- are low, modern and strung along embankment roads, most of them rebuilt after 1951.

At the water's edge are the casoni: fishing huts of timber and reed, some on stilts, which are the delta's only vernacular architecture and are steadily disappearing.