River Navigation and Industrial Projects in Riva: History and Controversies
“Back then, I believed in the navigable channel.” Lawyer Renato Ballardini, who was then a member of Parliament for the PSI, explains this conviction, which was also widely shared. “In the most developed industrial countries of Europe, Germany, France, and England, river transport was widely used. The advantages include very low operating costs.” That was the Europe of coal and steel, hungry for energy to power the industrial growth that was taking off after the immense disasters of World War II, still visible in the houses and in the people.
To stay local to our land, Edison had just finished piping the Sarca River, reversing its natural cycles and flows to generate electricity: and the municipalities, representatives of the ancient poverty of a land that had suffered from the hemorrhage of emigration, were more than satisfied with the money given by Bim (Brescia Industriale Marchi), as compensation for damages that few really understood what they were. In the (relatively) wealthy town of Riva, when the ashes of the Zontini carpentry shop suggested the possibility of building a paper mill on Viale Rovereto, on a marshy plot owned by Mandelli, no one raised concerns about potential noise, excessive water consumption, or traffic congestion.
Projects and Controversies
The Lotti company had hired hundreds and hundreds of masons, ensuring a steady flow of work; and then there would be hundreds of wages for the workers. In this climate, a industrial port at San Nicolò could also be accepted: a place out of the world, towards which a row of hotels had been built with hopes halfway, the rest financed by promissory notes. Furthermore, as an industrial port, it was born, with displays of hierarchy and blackshirts on the day of its inauguration.
“It was supposed to become a great port, the northernmost port of the Mediterranean. From the heart of Italy’s industrial area—Milan, Dalmine, Brescia—an array of small boats loaded with containers would sail up the Mincio and Lake Garda. Transfer would be on land, via road or rail. A forest of cranes, a convoy of trucks reaching right onto the lake’s shore running along the four lanes of the Brenner motorway branch (under construction throughout the 1960s) would load the containers, scattering them onto markets across northern Europe.” The project included the possibility of a standard-gauge railway branch, a powerful descendant of the beloved little train of Rovereto and Riva. By the late 1960s, protests ended the certainty that all that glitters was gold, perhaps naive, but definitely shared.
End of Projects and Environmental Impact
Lawyer Ballardini still recalls: “The program of the ‘Technical Committee for the Design of the Mincio-Ticino Navigable Canal’ withered away in Roman bureaucracy. For us in Riva, even personally, the threat of hydrocarbon spills that would inevitably accompany the traffic of small boats weighed heavily on my mind. The specter of oil transportation emerged.” The project was definitively abandoned during a meeting at Rocca, in the old Auditorium beneath frescoed ceilings by Giacomo Vittone, with Latin sails.
Some scholars from the University of Milano then demonstrated, irrefutably, with calculations in hand, that breaking the cargo load would make the journey too costly. Since it was unthinkable to extend the canal all the way to Munich or Stuttgart, further plans could not be pursued. The same scholars or their close relatives had also shown, fifteen years earlier, with calculations, that the money saved in the first part of the route, the waterway portion, would still have significantly remunerated the investment.
Ecology and Municipal Management
Meanwhile, ecology had emerged, which eventually intersected with San Nicolò. During the early 1970s, under Mayor Santi’s administration, Riva equipped itself with its first complete sewer system in its history: and at the foot of Brione, where it still exists, the sewage treatment plant was completed.