THE HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHICAL CONTEXT

The progressive reclamation of these territories, implemented gradually with greater intensity and effectiveness in the last twenty years of the 19th century and then in the first half of the 20th century, created the possibility of considerably expanding the areas destined for agriculture.

The Reclamation Consortiums that have arisen here, as happened in other areas of the Veneto and Italy, are clear evidence of this.

The farmhouse, which spread as a constructive model in these areas mainly between 1880 and 1935, had the function of providing a house adjacent to the workplace for the laborers who worked the land with sharecropping contracts. These structures generally arose quite isolated in each of the numerous landholdings. However, already towards the end of the 1950s, the industrialization process, the tourist development towards the sea and the mechanization of agricultural processes progressively reduced the number of laborers needed for agricultural activities. In 1964, sharecropping was definitively abolished in Italy. The 1966 flood also demonstrated that the river was not yet fully under control.

All this determined, in a rather rapid time, profound changes at a social and working level with a strong push towards the urbanization of an important part of the population.

Therefore, these large structures were, one could say overnight, abandoned and now remain only as important evidence of a precise historical phase: their demolition would have a high cost and unfortunately therefore their fate, in the absence of, at the moment no conservative interventions are foreseen, it seems to be the slow degradation.

I thank Dr. Piergiorgio Rossetto, a profound connoisseur of these territories and their anthropological characteristics, for the precious advice that he has generously placed at my disposal.

THEY HAVE GONE

The gaze of a traveler, who would like to immerse himself in the evocative atmosphere of the lower Piave, would be captured after a few kilometers by the discreet presence, in the landscape, of unusual imposing buildings integrated with unexpected material naturalness in the countryside.

These are the so-called farmhouses. This ends up creating in his mind, as he progresses through these places, day after day, a sort of sensation of an awaited appointment.

I lived this experience in an emotionally intense way, which went beyond documentary intent.

What I have tried to tell, “illustrating” and therefore inserting a strong interpretative component, is a story, one of the many stories hidden in these border areas between land and water. As an astonished and curious observer, as I felt throughout this slow journey of discovery, I have tried to give new life to this apparently “forgotten” landscape, sometimes also using my imagination, but more often trying to grasp its coy poetry, which I wanted to try to bring out. Past lives can be guessed inside and around these monuments of a peasant reality, now extinct. Stone dinosaurs mark the territory, almost a warning not to forget those who have rejoiced, suffered and worked hard and industriously here.

I therefore created images that could be defined as lively, in which however the patina of time maintains its discreet, unmistakable presence.