On November 14, 1951, the left bank of the Po River burst, just a few hundred meters from the Padua-Bologna railway bridge. Within minutes, the flood invaded the Polesine area, one of the poorest and most destitute regions of Northern Italy, of all of Italy, of Europe.

Not only the countryside was invaded, but one by one, every village, right up to the cities of Rovigo, Adria, and Cavarzere. Tens of thousands of men, women, and children were forced to flee, leaving everything they owned at the mercy of the muddy waters of the great river—the Po, as everyone called it, without any article, without any other declination, simply and immensely, the Po.

In 1951, RAI was only a radio station; television did not yet exist. To document the tragedy, Istituto Luce staff members set out from Rome, Bologna, and Venice, using their film cameras to chronicle Italy in newsreels shown every evening in theaters across the country, which had just entered the euphoria of post-war reconstruction. Their images were shocking: entire families fleeing on makeshift rafts, men and animals trapped on the roofs of submerged homes, a gigantic lake stretching at least 40 kilometers wide and over 80 kilometers long. The rescue operation was activated immediately, the entire army was mobilized, and navy amphibians, in the depths of a foggy and humid winter, rescued women, children, and elderly people shrouded in the few black wool rags of a land already wounded by poverty, hunger, and the disease of those who never saw the miracle of reconstruction. The outcry of solidarity is nationwide, with the government and the majority and opposition political forces taking action in a land bordering white Veneto and red Emilia, in the years when the division of the world had just begun and was still in limbo, especially in the Northeast. Even Soviet aid arrives, and De Gasperi’s Christian Democrats and the countries of the Atlantic Alliance immediately respond forcefully. But the water doesn’t go away; it remains there, immobile, putrid, rotten. Houses crumble, villages disappear, returning home is impossible: over 130,000 Polesani are forced to flee, Venetian refugees in many regions of the industrial North and beyond. They are frowned upon, singled out for their poverty, their rural dialect, their hands cracked by the earth, their eyes scarred by hunger. They live the shame of their tragedy, first passive objects of media and political pity, and soon afterward enemies at home, bearers of problems and ghosts from which the country had decided it must rid itself. The refugees of the great river, hundreds of them children, torn from their families during their escape and assigned to hospitals and religious institutions still 19th-century in form and manner. A popular epic that marked the lives of thousands, only to fall into the oblivion typical of the shames we prefer to forget.