Submerged Italian Village Resurfaces After 70 Years Underwater
smithsonianmag.com
smithsonianmag.com
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katakombenschule
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.
One example in Tuscany:
https://www.vaglipark.it/territorio/il-lago-e-il-paese-fanta...
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'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 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:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21178607
at least compared to some other EU countries.
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.
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.
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.
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.
(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?
She's scared, hungry, and never sleeps.
Then more people re-appear.
“A woman returns to her childhood home in northern Italy, which triggers terrifying hauntings” (IMDb, Curon 2020).
- 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)
https://www.onlyinyourstate.com/new-york/sunken-town-ny/
The state of New York has several towns submerged under artificial lakes created to give water to New York City.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regions_of_Italy#Autonomous_re...
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.
As an Italian: partial and partisan historic summaries do more harm than good.
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.»
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.
As long as you do not have uranium mines in your own back yard.
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.
> There are other possible power sources.
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.
The chances of this happening are... Slim.