Adventure in the “marshes”

Sun, 07 Aug 2011 05:40:34 +0000
Num. 34

Yesterday and today in the Po Delta Park

At the beginning we were clearly thrilled and amused, but this gradually changed to silence and then, towards the end of the adventure, we began to be afraid. We were classmates, just turned eight years old, and on that day we were on a trip to Mesola with my mother. A few days after the end of the school year in early June, she said: «I have a car to take me to paint in the Delta. Come along and bring a friend, if you want.

There you can play at being explorers in a wild world – just like the ones in the stories by your friend Salgari».

Who could have imagined that what she intended as a friendly joke would be- come frightening reality, that the Salgarian 'jungle effect' referred to the dense forest of reeds where we boys ended up by getting lost. The plants stretched out uniformly and unendingly. Well over three meters high, shooting up from the sandy soil with gnarled trunks as big as those of a young tree. The thick, sharp leaves rustling, blocking the view of the sky, sun and clouds, forming a canopy that impeded our sense of direction and made the atmosphere stifling. We had entered enemy territory and found ourselves in big trouble.

We realised that we didn't know whether to go to the right or to the left, forwards or backwards. No one answered our calls, repeated loudly and with increasing anxiety. Should we go this way or that? The adventure was finally brought to a close when we heard the repetitive sounding of the horn of the car that had brought us to the Po Delta marshes. I forgot all about it, of course, until one day many years later.

One spring, in the early seventies, I was working on a lengthy film project, one of the sixteen films in the series 'L'Italia dal cielo'. I flew over the marshes and the Po Delta Park in the light of a beautifully clear June, first at a high altitude, then almost brushing the water, strips of land, and dense green spots of vegetation.

We passed over small towns, houses that had been aban- doned and others where people came out to greet us. I returned several times to the marshes. At the start of the nineteen eighties, together with my son Brando who was starting his career as a film director, we made the film 'Le Ali del Delta', documenting the early development of the nature reserve created by the Ferrara Provincial administration.

I spoke with the poet Augusto Frassinetti of this natural wealth, and he wrote: «The rivers were revered by our ancestors as gods, as sovereigns of the territories they passed through. Although the myth was dispelled and the sacrifices and rites were discarded, the royal charm persisted, the brilliance of their incorruptible crowns: those oases of green, sometimes soft sometimes obscure, in waters of many different colours, as commanded by the reflections of the sky».

It was only later that I realized that my mother and I had loved and portrayed the landscapes of the world that re- flected the same unique beauty: open horizons in series of horizontal lines, strips of land suspended between water and sky, patches of deep blue and changing green.