Publications

Abstract:

‘If the Po has become marginal, its Delta is the margin of that margin’, writes journalist Stefano Liberti. The history of the Po Delta in northeastern Italy is undoubtedly one of marginalization. However, during the 1950s and 1960s, this area was also viewed as rich in resources such as natural gas and fertile soil obtained from land reclamation. Examining postwar audiovisual works, from Antonioni’s Gente del Po (1947) to Mazzacurati’s Notte Italiana (1987), I show that the delta’s historic ‘marginalization’ resulted from the transformation of an amphibious space — defined by the precarious interaction of land and water — into a series of ‘resource frontiers’ based on perceptions of the environment as an available commodity. In the second part of the article, I focus on Michele Vannucci’s Delta (2022) to illustrate that these frontiers have lost their historical context and become symbols of a marginalization that is not only economic and social but also existential.