Submerged Italian Village Resurfaces After 70 Years Underwater

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/medieval-italian-village-briefly-surfaces-after-70-years-underwater-180977838/

by Phithagoras • 5 years ago

87 45 5 years ago

smithsonianmag.com

rudolfwinestock• 5 years ago

Here are more examples.

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.

pfdietz• 5 years ago

Gilboa is the one I've heard about. When they were building the dam there, a quarry (to get rock to face the dam) unearthed a world-famous Lagerstätte of Devonian era fossilized trees.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilboa_Fossil_Forest

DonaldFisk• 5 years ago

A submerged town in Argentina resurfaces: https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2011/07/the-ruins-of-villa...

totalZero• 5 years ago

Here's a short film about the gentleman who returned:

https://vimeo.com/88706281

cbmuser• 5 years ago

One of the many examples how large hydropower plants destroy the environment.

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.

donjoe• 5 years ago

without the need to destroy large patches of land.

As long as you do not have uranium mines in your own back yard.

_Microft• 5 years ago

That‘s a false dichotomy. It’s not just hydropower OR nuclear power. There are other possible power sources. Beside that, here are image searches for „uranium mining“ if you are unaware of its environmental effects.

https://www.google.de/search?q=uranium+mining&tbm=isch

https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=uranium+mining

forrestthewoods• 5 years ago

My understanding is that if you dammed every river in the US worth damming for hydro it wouldn’t even cover a quarter of current energy needs. I tried a quick Google and couldn’t find anything to back that up though. So I could be wrong.

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.

nicodds3• 5 years ago

That is not completely true. Thermodynamics tells that, overall, to produce energy, you must spend a lot more energy. You may think to the nuclear plant: it doesn't build by itself, you produce lots of environmental pollution to get it

tsimionescu• 5 years ago

Unfortunately the same is true of the dams required for hydro - after all, concrete is a major green house polluter itself. Not sure which requires more concrete though, per MW.

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.

TedShiller• 5 years ago

Nuclear is great, as long as it’s in your backyard.

alex_duf• 5 years ago

There's an amazing French TV show called "The Returned" loosely inspired from an alpine lake with a submerged town underneath.

(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.

mseepgood• 5 years ago

There's also a Netflix show called "Curon".

bryanrasmussen• 5 years ago

Is Curon a Returned remake?

dopidopHN• 5 years ago

Ha. Good show indeed.

peoplefromibiza3• 5 years ago

Fun facts about Les Revenants:

- 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)

mkl2• 5 years ago

To someone in a country with a tiny handful of its oldest buildings as much as 200 years old (NZ), the idea of drowning a bell tower built in the 1300s seems totally insane. I guess Italy has a lot of old buildings, and Mussolini & co. didn't care about these ones.

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.

tlamponi2• 5 years ago

I guess Italy has a lot of old buildings, and Mussolini & co. didn't care about these ones.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italianization_of_South_Tyrol

jaclaz2• 5 years ago

Well, without any kind of language or racial conflict, we (in Italy) do have a few such villages (or anyway buildings/farms/etc.) that were submerged when building new basins/artificial lakes (for hydro power plants or for regulating rivers, etc.).

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:

https://mapio.net/pic/p-29646863/

ehnto4• 5 years ago

I know just how you feel, being from Australia. I'm often a little envious of other countries having such rich and meaningful heritage surrounding them, it can be harder to feel grounded in a country so young.

newsclues• 5 years ago

Until that heritage slows or prevents development and it becomes costly!

pasabagi2• 5 years ago

Doesn't Australia have just as long a history as anywhere else though? It seems to me people just aren't all that interested in pre-settlement history. The same goes for a lot of settler-colonial nations.

nitrogen• 5 years ago

Just think how much more opportunity that gives you -- instead of living in the shadow of a hundred prior generations, you can form the foundation on which future generations will be built.

garbagetime• 5 years ago

Just to clarify, since your comment is maybe a bit ambiguous, New Zealand did have buildings in the 1300s (it's just that they weren't built to last, and haven't survived).

eliben2• 5 years ago

Interestingly, NZ has been settled by Polynesians only around 1300 or so (I think the latest estimates vary by +/- a few decades)

mkl2• 5 years ago

Thanks, I actually intended to put the word "surviving" in there.

eliben2• 5 years ago

1300 CE seems insane? The Middle East is like hold my hummus (https://www.timesofisrael.com/archaeological-dig-uncovers-10... etc.)

didntknowya• 5 years ago

we do have the Horahora station which was submerged in Lake Karapiro when the new dam was built- but that's one architecture that will likely not be missed.

tlamponi2• 5 years ago

Didn't expect it to be /the/ South Tyrolean village, but figures, there only that many provinces that Italy annexed and tried to screw over locals, basically the five which nowadays have somewhat autonomy (after years of fight, both peaceful and also not so peaceful):

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reschensee

peoplefromibiza3• 5 years ago

that Italy annexed and tried to screw over locals,

As an Italian: partial and partisan historic summaries do more harm than good.

peoplefromibiza3• 5 years ago

to expand a little bit: the annexion of the South Tyrol area dates back to 1920, after the first World war.

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.»

Submerged Italian Village Resurfaces After 70 Years Underwater

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