Water, dams, dlectricity. Unprecedented experiments in Basilicata in the early Twentieth Century

Abstract

In the wake of Nitti’s innovative concepts between the 19th and 20th centuries, the essay reconstructs the unpublished history of the planning of Lucanian reservoirs within the framework of the plans outlined by the special legislation for Basilicata in 1904. The need to ensure energy supply, no longer through the exploitation of coal, but through the construction of plants for hydroelectric power production, triggered an important planning phase that was supposed to lead to the creation of artificial reservoirs to collect and exploit the abundant waters of the Lucanian rivers. These realizations, not exclusively aimed at meeting the needs of Lucania, were supposed to generate hydroelectric energy to be distributed to a large part of the continental South: an ambitious and innovative program that, however, would have been realized in the second half of the 20th century. Thanks to the documentation of the Civil Commissariat for Basilicata, it has been possible to demonstrate how Francesco Saverio Nitti’s ideas were already influencing southern policy at the beginning of the century. His vision combined environmentalist logic with visionary plans for industrial development, in an attempt to rescue the South from the stagnant situation into which an excessively conservative policy risked relegating it.