Via dei Remi

The Po Delta guards a geography that does not yield easily to reading: land wrested from water, canals that cut across the plain with an almost artificial geometry, valli da pesca (fishing valleys) where silence has a texture of its own. Moving through this borderland between dry land and lagoon is the Via dei Remi, a route that follows the ancient connecting ways used for centuries by the inland boatmen of the Ferrara area — those who carried goods, fish and people along the waterways linking Comacchio to the rest of the Po plain.

The name itself carries the weight of a material civilisation. The oar was not a sporting implement but a working tool, the extension of the arm of someone who knew every bend in the canal, every shift in the bed, every sign in the sky that announced the bora wind. The communities of the Delta built around inland navigation a specific vocabulary, a calendar of practices and a set of professional figures — the barcaiolo (boatman), the valligiano (valley worker), the eel fisherman — who left traces still recognisable today in local traditions, in place names, in seasonal festivals, in the way nets are worked and fish preserved. The Manifattura dei Marinati of Comacchio, dating back to the seventeenth century, is one of the nodes of this memory: here eel was processed according to techniques handed down through generations, and the eel-fishing cycle in the Valli di Comacchio set the rhythm of the entire year.

The route crosses land reclamation areas that, in the twentieth century, radically changed the character of the territory, draining stretches of water that had once been thoroughfares. Walking the Via dei Remi also means reckoning with this layering: today's landscape is the result of hydraulic works dating back to the Estense land reclamations of the fifteenth century and continuing through to the great engineering projects of the last century, and the marks of these transformations can be read in the layout of the canals, in the chiaviche (sluice gates), in the pumping stations that dot the plain like minor monuments to a forgotten engineering.

Compared with the great regional itineraries, the Via dei Remi offers neither a religious narrative nor a route codified with the same precision as the Via Francigena or the Via Romea Germanica. What it offers instead is continuity with a way of life that mass tourism has rendered invisible: that of the lagoon populations, bound to an amphibious territory that demanded precise skills and a deep knowledge of natural cycles. The Po Delta Park, which includes this area across the provinces of Ferrara and Ravenna, now protects what remains of those environments, but the walk itself gives back something that a purely naturalistic visit cannot capture: the sense of a direction, of a path that someone has already walked before, for different purposes and with different tools.