Genivolta

Within a few hundred square metres, inside the territory of Genivolta, three watercourses cross that between them built the farming of half the province: the Naviglio Civico di Cremona, the Naviglio Grande Pallavicino and the Vacchelli canal. The place is called Tombe Morte, and it is no accident that they meet here: the plain is cut by a relict river valley, that of the Morbasco, which narrows at exactly this point and forces the canals together, letting them part again as soon as the furrow widens. The Vacchelli discharges almost all its flow into the other two and into a dozen smaller irrigation ditches, through a system of sluices.

The name sounds macabre and nobody can explain it for certain. To those who work with water a tomba is a siphon, the structure that carries one canal under another: dead tombs would be siphons fallen out of use. But in the nineteen-seventies, digging nearby, several dozen late Roman burials were found, vaulted over with brick, and perhaps the cemetery had always been known. The place has a second name too, Le Formose. It can only be reached on foot or by bicycle, and it is the first nucleus of the ecomuseum of the province of Cremona.