In the lower Polesine people farm, drive and live below the sea. According to the Consorzio di bonifica Delta del Po, at Mea, in Porto Viro, and in the Ex Valli of Porto Tolle the ground lies 3-3.5 metres below mean sea level.
It was not always so. What made the ground sink was above all subsidence linked to the extraction of methane-bearing water, between the late 1930s and the early 1960s: in the worst spots the ground dropped by as much as 20 centimetres a year. And the phenomenon has not entirely stopped: in those areas, between 1983 and 2008, the ground sank another 50 centimetres.
Today these lands stay dry thanks to an unbroken network of embankments, canals and pumping stations. Along the roads of the Delta, the fields lying below the horizon tell this story.
