The slow death of the Po

Italy’s longest river, the Po, was once called the “king of rivers” (“fluviorum rex”) by Virgil. It was considered mighty less for its length – it’s only about 652 k m long – than for its expanding girth: the countryside next to the river, the Padanian plain, was so flat that the Po was often less of a river than a slow-moving marsh, always flooding land dozens of kilometres either side of its porous banks.

Since it flows entirely in Italian territory – rising a few hundred metres inside the French-Italian border in the Cottian Alps and heading east until it reaches the Adriatic Sea just south of Venice – the Po is part of the national psyche. The poet Guido Ceronetti once wrote: “You need to understand the Po to understand Italy,” but now – as northern Italy faces its worst drought in 70 years – the river is also a prism through which to glimpse the country’s ecological emergency.

It has, in some places, completely disappeared this summer. Next to Saluzzo, upstream of Turin, I walked from one bank to the other without wetting my feet. There was only white gravel with buddleia where the “great river” was supposed to be. The Po has 141 tributaries, so further downstream the river does return. But in late June, the flow measured at Pontelagoscuro, near Ferrara, fell below an average of 145 cubic metres per second (the historic average flow for June is 1,805 cubic metres per second). At Cremona – roughly half way along the Po – the water is more than 8 metres below “hydrographic