Modernism and Water Engineering as Development Strategies: the Case of Venetian Inland Waterways in the New Italian State (1866-1966)

Surface freshwaters system management can be considered as one of the most relevant issues in an effectual organization of modern States. It follows that specific technocratic rhetoric have been spreading in order to promote the governance of a hydrographic network and water drainage and reclamation actually had the leading role in reinforcing the growing nationalism in all of Europe from the end of XIX century. Modernization operations actually began at the end of the Nineteenth century and developed even further after the first world war, in an atmosphere characterized by extensive plans of urban regeneration involving many Italian towns. During the second world war most of Italian infrastructures were heavily damaged and in the second post-war period, the economic recession did not allow a continuous and efficient maintenance of the waterway system in the Venetian inland. It was only during the last decades of the Twentieth century that a more mature consideration of the historical and cultural meaning of fluvial and urban landscapes developed.