BIG WATER

“L’acva la è stila”, The water is thin, a man tells me in Romagnolo dialect as he cleans his house from the slimy mud. The memory left by the river and once a promise of fertility. The monster can manifest itself in many ways, destroying every certainty painstakingly built over years of work. Drop by drop, it slowly seeps into the floors and walls, rising from the saturated ground, silent and unstoppable. Or it can roar like a ferocious beast and explode in an instant like the shot of a cannon. After a long period of drought, Romagna is hit by an exceptional phase of bad weather in two successive waves, on May 3rd and 4th, and on May 16th and 17th, 2023. In just a few days, 400 mm of rain falls, an amount typically expected over a span of 6 months. 23 rivers overflow at over 50 points, flooding entire industrious cities, the fertile surrounding countryside, and important productive areas with water and mud. 500 landslides are triggered, roads, bridges, and railways collapse. In the province of Ravenna alone, over 16% of the territory is evacuated by the population. One of the affected cities is Cervia. During the night between May 16th and 17th, the Savio River breaches its banks and invades the surrounding fields with unprecedented force. For 3 days, the flow of water is uncontrollable, and attempts to stop it prove futile as trucks and bulldozers cannot reach the point of rupture. Even the road has been engulfed. A new immense lake forms for kilometers, covering the fi