To someone in a country with a tiny handful of its oldest buildings as much as 200 years old (NZ), the idea of drowning a bell tower built in the 1300s seems totally insane. I guess Italy has a lot of old buildings, and Mussolini & co. didn't care about these ones.
> I guess Italy has a lot of old buildings, and Mussolini & co. didn't care about these ones.
Yes and no, while Italy has lots of old buildings, that wasn't the reason here to overlook destroying those.
Rather, this was the newly annexed province with a population speaking natively German (or better a German dialect related to the Bavarian one). Mussolini tried hard to subdue the population, forbidding also to teach German in schools for a time, which resulted in the "Katakombenschulen", schools in the underground which taught childern in German secretly.
So where to carry out destructive projects to build power plants and the-like than in the freshly annexed area?
Mussolini moved lots of Italians from the south to that area to enforce Italianisation, those people often were forced to do so and coming from a totally different climate they struggled with the harsh winters in the mid of the Alps.
Quite the messed up period which lasted, at least to some degree, even after Mussolini's death.
Well, without any kind of language or racial conflict, we (in Italy) do have a few such villages (or anyway buildings/farms/etc.) that were submerged when building new basins/artificial lakes (for hydro power plants or for regulating rivers, etc.).
The basin was due to be emptied for the first time in 2021 (after last time in 1994) but will probably be postponed to 2022.
If you think about it, it is pretty much "normal", ancient villages were either built on top of hills (that guaranteed better defense) or in the middle of valleys crossed by a river (that guaranteed water in abundance).
You build dams to use the valley as basin, so if there is a village/bulding in it it all depends on the current (at the time of the project) architectural/landscape/historical sensibility of the society to either abandon the project, move/relocate the buildings ( like to make a famous reference Abu Simbel in Egypt) or submerse everything.
As another (small) example in Tuscany, when the lake of Bilancino was built in the 1980's, everything in the valley was submersed (to be fair very few buildings of dubious historical value existed in the area) but a monumental gate was moved on another area, at a higher level:
I live in house that was built in the 13th century (also in Tuscany), which isn't typical, but as far as I know the building isn't of any historical significance whatsoever.
I'm no hurry to have it submerged, but I can see how various past administrations didn't think much of doing so. For a more striking example, after the second world war there was an effort to empty out the inhabitants living in precarious conditions in prehistoric dwellings in Matera (and those are almost ten thousand years old).
The submersion of (historical) buildings/villages is all about "how much they are valued?/how much does it cost to save them?" and "are we ready to spend that klnd of money?".
The latter example is a different thing, it is "health" related, just like the norms amd Laws about houses, specifying the the minimal requirements to be able to call a house "habitable", or suitable for humans to live in, that evolved during the years and nowadays are in Italy among - believe - the strictest ones, see this old post of mine that lists some of the base requirements:
Matera was an example of extraordinarily old dwellings even for Italy, not of the decision making process (sorry, that was a bit unclear).
The decision was in part health-and-safety related and in part a political issue of "people technically living in caverns makes us look bad" - the idea of fixing the living conditions in the Sassi instead of moving people in newly built houses was far from the sensibilities of the time.
I know just how you feel, being from Australia. I'm often a little envious of other countries having such rich and meaningful heritage surrounding them, it can be harder to feel grounded in a country so young.
Doesn't Australia have just as long a history as anywhere else though? It seems to me people just aren't all that interested in pre-settlement history. The same goes for a lot of settler-colonial nations.
I don’t know if things are better now, but in the early 2000s, the Australian education system barely touched on indigenous history. It was mentioned mostly in the context of the colonial settlers, almost like indigenous people came into being only to play a role in Australia’s colonial history.
In my schooling we went on indigenous camps and every year there were workshops at school. We learned directly from them about dream time, walkabouts, weaving and their language, painting and instruments. It was something at least, and pretty special in retrospect. This was in the 90s and 2000s.
Land rights are getting better too. The tribes in Nhulunbuy own their land and rent it back to the town and mine site. My father worked boats there and spent a lot of time with the indigenous, it's definitely not all happy stories but again, after what we have done it was never going to be.
I can see the point though: it's hard to do history about oral traditions, doubly so for oral traditions where most of the people in the tradition have been displaced or killed.
Also, politicians tend to see history as a sort of 'national identity' education, and I don't think the dominant political trends in Australia are ready to face this part of the Australian national story, which is cowardly, but it's a very common form of cowardice.
Spot on, and something that can go unsaid is that even unity is a bitter pill to swallow for the indigenous. There is no saving face for politicians so it remains the elephant in the room.
I will say I am glad we are trying though. There is a lot being done, and inclusion of the indigenous history in our cities is a great step. Many things here have been renamed with their old indigenous names, which really drives home the point that it wasn't just barren land prior to settlement.
Oh of course, and I am proud to have been raised along side it, but that heritage isn't mine. If anything my limited heritage in Australia decimated their centuries here, that is not something to be proud of.
Just think how much more opportunity that gives you -- instead of living in the shadow of a hundred prior generations, you can form the foundation on which future generations will be built.
Just to clarify, since your comment is maybe a bit ambiguous, New Zealand did have buildings in the 1300s (it's just that they weren't built to last, and haven't survived).
we do have the Horahora station which was submerged in Lake Karapiro when the new dam was built- but that's one architecture that will likely not be missed.
There's an amazing French TV show called "The Returned" loosely inspired from an alpine lake with a submerged town underneath.
(Don't watch the American remake, watch the french one with subtitles)
The pitch being: people thought to be long dead start re-appearing. A twin sister thought to be dead comes back, except her sister had the time to be a teenager by now, so one looks the same as when she "died" and the other carried on living her life. How do you re-instate someone in a society when they've been declared dead? What will the neighbours think?
- the main location is the city of Annecy, in South-east France, on the exact oposite side of the Alps were the city of the post is
- the underwater scenes were shot in Italy, precisely in the Tirino river in the small town of Capistrano, in central Italy (in the province of Aquila, Abruzzo region)
From the article, “The eerie drowned village inspired a 2018 novel, Resto Qui by Italian author Marco Balzano, and a 2020 Netflix thriller television series, ‘Curon.’”
“A woman returns to her childhood home in northern Italy, which triggers terrifying hauntings” (IMDb, Curon 2020).
Gilboa is the one I've heard about. When they were building the dam there, a quarry (to get rock to face the dam) unearthed a world-famous Lagerstätte of Devonian era fossilized trees.
Didn't expect it to be /the/ South Tyrolean village, but figures, there only that many provinces that Italy annexed and tried to screw over locals, basically the five which nowadays have somewhat autonomy (after years of fight, both peaceful and also not so peaceful):
Disclaimer: I'm South Tyrolean and nowadays the relation with the Italian gov. is quite good, which we probably can only thank the fact that the long fight got us that right reserved in the constitution itself, else one of the right wing administrations (e.g., Silvio Berlusconi in the 90s) would have dismantled it all, they tried but constitution rights are well protected.
Anyway, the view with the submerged church in Reschensee is something one doesn't view every day, I'd recommend visiting once it dooable again, there are many nice places in South Tyrol and also in the neighbouring provinces, be it the Italian, Austrian or Swiss ones.
to expand a little bit: the annexion of the South Tyrol area dates back to 1920, after the first World war.
Skipping the previous heavy germanization of a Roman region, there was the forced Italianisation during the fascist regime in Italy, which is not exactly Italy screwing over locals, but a tyranny trying to screw over everyone, including Italians.
South Tyrol has been ruled an independent region in 1946, after WW2 by the Italian authorities and definitely granted the status in the 70s of the past century by the UN.
So they have been an autonomous region for at least 50 years.
Quoting OP «nowadays the relation with the Italian gov. is quite good» can be translated to «they have been good for a long time».
I know there are still irredentists who still see themselves as part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, but, honestly, I believe they should move on.
Anyway, talking about it here it's completely off topic as per HN guidelines
«Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents.»
One of the many examples how large hydropower plants destroy the environment.
That’s why nuclear is the better option these days: It’s low-carbon, capable of baseload and provides large amounts of energy without the need to destroy large patches of land.
That‘s a false dichotomy. It’s not just hydropower OR nuclear power. There are other possible power sources. Beside that, here are image searches for „uranium mining“ if you are unaware of its environmental effects.
My understanding is that if you dammed every river in the US worth damming for hydro it wouldn’t even cover a quarter of current energy needs. I tried a quick Google and couldn’t find anything to back that up though. So I could be wrong.
I’m pretty sure hydro is a dead end. It can’t supply our needs today, much less in the future. And they’re environmental disasters both upstream and downstream.
Covering a quarter of your energy needs from hydro would be immense for balancing of other sources that need it. So I definitely wouldn't scoff at hydro.
That is not completely true. Thermodynamics tells that, overall, to produce energy, you must spend a lot more energy. You may think to the nuclear plant: it doesn't build by itself, you produce lots of environmental pollution to get it
Unfortunately the same is true of the dams required for hydro - after all, concrete is a major green house polluter itself. Not sure which requires more concrete though, per MW.
Still, nuclear requires fuel, and mining is an extraordinarily dirty industry, so I would guess hydro generally wins out overall.
However, if we are to avoid global climate catastrophe, we need to consume less energy, there is no future in consuming ever more but slightly cleaner. Especially given that in Europe and the US and so on we already have enough energy for all basic human needs, while the developing world still needs far more energy to achieve this. So to make room for them in the planet's remaining budget, we would have to not just stop building more, but actually reduce some of our power most likely.
An Hydro plant doesn't have the same security requirements as a nuclear one. You may think for example to shielding for ionizing radiation. It all adds up to the count.
New Zealand has rebuilt (parts of) at least one town higher up to make a hydro lake (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cromwell,_New_Zealand), but didn't drown anything like as old or significant.