Mesola

The name says media insula, the middle island, and the whole history of this land lies in the balance between water and earth in the ancient Valle Padusa. The territory is entirely flat and largely below sea level, but the lines of the dunes that were the ancient coast can still be seen: at Massenzatica some fifty hectares of fossil dunes are a nature reserve, and they serve to show where the sea reached in Roman times. All the rest has been wrested from the water in three goes: first the Este in the sixteenth century, then a reclamation company in the second half of the nineteenth, finally the delta authority, with a system of canals, sluices and pumping stations entrusted with the daily government of the waters. The comune's coat of arms, for that matter, shows a phoenix rising from its own fire and gazing at the sun: for a place remade so many times it is a reasonable choice.

Comuni, too, come and go here. Massenzatica existed as a comune from the Middle Ages — it is cited in an act of the abbey of Pomposa of the fourteenth century — and exists no longer: between November 1816 and the following February the two hamlets of Ariano, on the two banks of the Po, were struck by an epidemic of exanthematic typhus that caused twenty-nine deaths, and the effect, the source says, was the suppression of the comune. Mesola itself has been a comune only since 1828, and from that same day it took Massenzatica in. Then, in 1962, it lost a piece: Goro, until then one of its hamlets, was made an autonomous comune by presidential decree. And one of the hamlets has a name with a story inside it: it was called al cuch, that is the cuckoo, it was urbanised as a reclamation settlement in 1936, and in 1940 it was renamed Italba in honour of the Ferrarese hierarch Italo Balbo, killed in Libya. The castle the Este built as a hunting residence today houses the library and the museum of the wood and the deer, because in the Bosco della Mesola there lives a native subspecies of deer.