Along the waterways from Mantua to Venice
Building a cultural landscape
Program
The city of Mantua is historically linked to its location at the center of a system of relationships with the cities of the plain up to the edge of the Apennines on one side and up to the Adriatic Sea to the East. In history this role of strategic importance has been guaranteed by its median position in the Plain, and by a dense network of road and river connections.
The image of Mantua as a river port surrounded by its lakes, portrayed in many of the city’s historical prints and in archive photos up to the early 1900s, clearly represents this role, which took shape in the relationship of the city’s architecture with the waters.
Furthermore, in the history of the city, since the regulation of the lake waters started in the 12th century by Pitentino, there is an idea, which emerges only at times but always returns with new hydraulic enterprises, of the navigability of the river systems that connect it with the entire territory and therefore of its role as a river port.
Today, navigability from Mantua to the Adriatic is permitted by natural waterways, lock systems and a series of waterways built throughout the 20th century up to the present day. In Mantua, the Valdaro river port is operational from a commercial point of view, while from a tourist point of view, although in a less developed way, the piers of Lago di Mezzo, Lago Inferiore and Porto Catena are active, the historic port and arsenal of the city currently being planned for redevelopment and development.
From this premise, the idea of a research project for the construction of a cultural landscape from Mantua to Venice was born, along the ancient and new routes of the riverways. A cultural landscape that can be reconstructed first of all through the connection, strengthened and efficient, of a series of notable places that characterize it.
A highly technological water transport system powered by renewable energy would allow the network of connections to be strengthened with new and different possibilities for both tourism and infrastructure purposes.
The hydraulic engineering systems and structures, the natural and agricultural landscapes, the lake and river parks, and finally the cities and architectures directly connected to the river route, such as Ferrara for example almost exactly halfway along the route that leads to the Adriatic, act as reference points and notable places on this route: real cultural stations that, when connected, could feed a narration of the history of the places and their values, but above all a rediscovery and circulation of new ideas and cultural exchanges.
From this perspective, design interventions become indispensable alongside historical research into the values that link the vision of a possible cultural landscape.
The architectural project in fact takes on the responsibility not only of responding to the functional, programmatic and strategic needs that a territorial plan of this kind imposes, but also of activating, through the dialogue between old and new, the rediscovery, valorization and re-establishment of the values that we find in the heritage.
History is a heritage of meanings that are expressed in forms, from which lessons can be extracted and investigated to rewrite those meanings and bring them to us with a renewed sense. Through analogies with the forms of the Heritage of territories and cities, we can come to understand the system of values that belongs to places and re-present it in the present through the project, updating it and adding a part that reflects our time. And by re-presenting themselves, the meanings of these forms have repercussions, revealing the identity of places and generating a sense of belonging.