Before becoming a master of cinema, Michelangelo Antonioni travelled down the Po with a film camera. In «Gente del Po» (People of the Po), shot in the middle of the war, he follows a cargo barge for a day all the way to the sea and observes the poor life of the riverside villages, including the area around Porto Tolle.
The war interrupted the work and part of the footage was lost: the documentary, about eleven minutes long, was released only in 1947. Ten years later Antonioni returned to the embankments with «Il grido» (The Cry, 1957), set in the Po valley, which won first prize at the Locarno Festival.
He was not the only one: Visconti, Rossellini, De Santis, Lattuada, Soldati and Vancini all filmed or set works in the Delta. In 2018 Palazzo Roverella told this story in the exhibition «Cinema! Storie, protagonisti, paesaggi».
