Rosolina

The shape of the Po delta is a decision taken in Venice, and Rosolina is the land that came out of it. After the Ficarolo breach, in the twelfth century, the river split and one branch came out right here, building this territory with its own silt. By the sixteenth century that branch, the Po di Tramontana, was threatening to silt up the lagoon and ruin the ports of Chioggia and Venice: so between 1600 and 1604 the cut of Porto Viro was dug, sending the river further south into the sacca di Goro; the Tramontana was dammed off in 1612, the Po di Levante in 1648. The delta has the triangular shape it has today because of those works, and the mouth that closed is still called Boccavecchia. The new land was assigned to Venetian patrician families, and the map still carries their names: Ca' Diedo, Ca' Morosini, Moceniga, and the fishing valleys Veniera, Sagreda, Centona, Capitania.

Rosolina's administrative history is a coming and going too. For centuries it was part of Loreo; it became a municipality in 1806 under Napoleon, went back to Loreo in 1811, was made autonomous again by the Austrians in 1816, passed from the province of Venice to that of Rovigo in 1851, and between 1929 and 1947 was once more a hamlet of Loreo. It has been an independent municipality, for good, only since the first of January 1948. Today it lives on fishing and above all on the sea: Rosolina Mare, the island of Albarella, five kilometres long and one and a half wide, where the main means of transport is the bicycle, and the coastal botanical garden of Porto Caleri.