Why one of Europe's wealthiest regions is choking on its own success — and what history tells us about the way out.
There is a stretch of land in northern Italy where civilisations have risen and fallen with the rhythms of a single, restless river. The Po Valley, cradled between the Alps to the north and the Apennines to the south, has been one of Europe's most consequential landscapes for over three millennia. It has nurtured Bronze Age glass artisans, Etruscan merchant princes, Venetian hydraulic engineers, and Fascist-era land reformers. Each generation faced the same fundamental challenge: how to master the water that gave the valley its extraordinary fertility, giving rise to highly productive agricuture, and innovative industries, while threatening to swallow its settlements whole.
Today, the Po Valley faces a new environmental crisis — not of water, but of air. The same bowl-shaped topography that once funnelled trade routes from the Baltic to the Mediterranean now traps atmospheric pollutants with devastating efficiency. Fine particulate matter regularly exceeds both European Union limits and World Health Organization guidelines, and the region endures some of the worst air quality on the continent. The question posed in this article is as simple as it is uncomfortable: if historical republics and authoritarian regimes alike could summon the political will to conquer water, why can't modern Europe conquer the air?
A River That Made and Unmade Civilisations
The report opens not in the smog-choked streets of modern Milan but in the Bronze Age, at a settlement called Frattesina. Founded in the twelfth century BC on the southern bank of the Po, roughly twenty-five miles from the Adriatic coast, Frattesina was a major commercial hub linking transalpine Europe with the Mediterranean world. Archaeological evidence reveals the staggering diversity of its trade networks: Alpine copper and gold, Cornish tin, Baltic amber, north African elephant ivory, and ostrich eggshells all passed through its workshops. Most remarkably, Frattesina hosted what is currently the oldest known glass-making furnace in Europe, producing thousands of vibrant, multicoloured beads with a chemical composition entirely distinct from contemporary Mediterranean glass (Biavati & Verità, 1989; Angelini et al., 2004).
But the Po is a river that does not stay still. Climatic shifts in the late Bronze Age caused it to change course, cutting Frattesina off from the navigable waterways that sustained its economy. The settlement declined, and successor ports rose to take its place. The most spectacular was Spina, an Etruscan port city established by the end of the sixth century BCE at the ancient mouth of the Po. Spina grew so wealthy through Greek trade that it maintained a treasury at Delphi — an honour normally reserved for Greek cities themselves. Yet the delta eventually silted up Spina's harbour too, and after a Gallic sack around 400 BC, the city sank beneath the marshes for two and a half thousand years. Only later to be re-discovered by arial archeology.
The irony is extraordinary: it was twentieth-century land reclamation that finally unearthed Spina's necropolis, revealing over four thousand burials and one of the world's finest collections of Attic red-figure ceramics, now housed in the National Archaeological Museum of Ferrara.
Venice, the Dutch, and the Politics of Engineering
The report's historical narrative reaches its crescendo with the Venetian Republic, whose approach to water management was nothing short of an act of state survival. Venice understood that the lagoon — its moat, its highway, its identity — depended on a delicate hydrological balance. Too much silt and the lagoon would become dry land. Too much saltwater incursion and it would become open sea.
In 1530, the Republic established the Magistrato alle Acque, a specialised institution that integrated engineering expertise with political authority. Its crowning achievement was the Taglio di Porto Viro, completed in 1604 after nearly forty years of planning. This colossal project diverted the Po along a seven-kilometre canal, preventing the progressive silting of the Venice lagoon. It required overcoming papal vetoes, sabotage, disease, and land expropriation disputes. Over a thousand labourers were employed under conditions of extraordinary difficulty. On 16 September 1604, the water of the Po was diverted into its new channel, and a new delta was born (Serenissima News, 2020).
The report draws a deliberate parallel with the Dutch Republic's contemporaneous poldering programme. Both were republican, commonwealth governments that treated water management as a matter of collective survival, created specialised institutions, and demonstrated that sustained investment and the subordination of private interests to public welfare could reshape entire physical environments.
Even the Fascist regime's bonifica integrale of the 1930s, which turned malarial swamps into farmland and employed over 78,000 people, demonstrated that states could marshal resources for environmental transformation. Research published in the Journal of Economic Growth has shown that the political loyalty generated by distributing reclaimed land to families persisted for decades, even surviving the transition to democracy (Carillo, 2022). This was the main driver for the fascist regime, not the common good.
The Air Crisis: Invisible, Lethal, and Getting Worse
The second half of the report pivots to the present, and the picture is grim. The Po Valley is home to over sixteen million Italians and generates nearly half the country's GDP. But the same mountain-ringed topography that made it a cradle of trade now acts as a lid on atmospheric pollutants, particularly during winter temperature inversions when warm air settles above cooler ground-level air, preventing pollutants from dispersing (IQAir, 2026).
The pollutant mix is complex and multi-sectoral. Approximately 400,000 tonnes of nitrogen oxides, 250,000 tonnes of ammonia, 80,000 tonnes of particulate matter, and 50,000 tonnes of sulphur dioxide are emitted annually from traffic, heating, industry, energy production, and agriculture (PREPAIR Consortium, 2020). Critically, the most dangerous component of Po Valley pollution is not emitted directly but formed through atmospheric chemistry. When agricultural ammonia — accounting for approximately 97% of total ammonia emissions in Lombardy — encounters nitrogen oxides from road transport, it forms ammonium nitrate, which constitutes up to 60% of PM10 in the Po River basin (Renna et al., 2024).
The COVID-19 lockdowns of 2020 provided a natural experiment that confirmed agriculture's outsized role. Despite the partial suspension of travel and industry, particulate matter levels remained stubbornly high. Researchers from the CMCC Foundation concluded that agriculture is the main producer of ammonia emissions in the Po Valley and contributes substantially to secondary aerosol formation. A 2024 study estimated that livestock farming alone may be responsible for as much as a quarter of Lombardy's air pollution (Granella et al., 2024).
The health toll is severe, but is not internalized in the cost-benefit analysis of taking effective measure. Italy recorded 11,282 premature deaths from nitrogen dioxide exposure in 2021 — the highest figure in Europe. These are real people and real costs. Despite being economically richer and healthier in diet than the country's south, the Po region shows higher cancer mortality rates. Milan's 2024 annual average PM2.5 concentration was 17 µg/m³, over three times the WHO annual guideline of 5 µg/m³. During winter peaks, using Berkeley Earth's widely cited approximation, breathing Milan's air is equivalent to the health impact of smoking roughly 1.5 cigarettes per day (Rohde & Muller, 2015).
The Hard Truth: Why Air Is Harder Than Water
The report's most intellectually honest contribution is its refusal to let the historical analogy work too neatly. Mastering water was, on balance, economically generative. It created farmland, protected trade routes, and opened territory for settlement. Those who invested could expect tangible returns. Mastering air, by contrast, requires imposing costs on activities that are already profitable — restricting agricultural emissions, phasing out wood burning, tightening vehicle standards. The political economy is fundamentally reversed: Venice's environmental project enriched its supporters, while the Po Valley's air quality project will, at least in the short term, cost its opponents.
The precedents in California and the Netherlands of successfully reducing air pollution from agriculture, show that transformation is possible. The EU must develop sector-specific tools that go beyond the transport-focused strategies that worked in North America.
What Needs to Happen
The report concludes with five specific calls to action: enforce EU air quality directives without further derogation; integrate agricultural ammonia into air quality strategy with the same seriousness as transport emissions; accelerate the transition from residential wood burning to clean heating; recognise the challenge as European rather than merely Italian; and confront the moral dimension of allowing thousands of preventable deaths, and ignoring the full economic costs of this, each year in one of the world's richest regions.
With the 2026 Winter Olympics bringing global attention to Milan, the moment for action has arrived. Milan's 2024 annual average PM2.5 concentration was 17 µg/m³, over three times the WHO annual guideline of 5 µg/m³. During winter peaks, using Berkeley Earth's widely cited approximation, breathing Milan's air is equivalent to the health impact of smoking roughly 1.5 cigarettes per day (Rohde & Muller, 2015).
The science is clear, the technology exists, and the investment has been quantified. What is missing is what the Venetian Republic possessed in abundance: institutional determination, and the refusal to accept that a solvable problem should go unsolved.
References
Angelini, I., Artioli, G., Bellintani, P., Diella, V., Gemmi, M., Polla, A., & Rossi, A. (2004). Chemical analyses of Bronze Age glasses from Frattesina di Rovigo, Northern Italy. Journal of Archaeological Science, 31(8), 1175–1184.
Biavati, A., & Verità, M. (1989). The glass from Frattesina, a glassmaking center in the late Bronze Age. Rivista della Stazione Sperimentale del Vetro, 4, 295–299.
Carillo, M. F. (2022). Fascistville: Mussolini's new towns and the persistence of neo-fascism. Journal of Economic Growth, 27, 527–567.
Granella, F., et al. (2024). The formation of secondary inorganic aerosols: A data-driven investigation of Lombardy's secondary inorganic aerosol problem. Atmospheric Environment, 318, 120218.
PREPAIR Consortium. (2020). Improving air quality in the Po Valley, Italy: Some results by the LIFE-IP-PREPAIR project. Atmosphere, 11(4), 429.
Renna, S., et al. (2024). Impacts of agriculture on PM10 pollution and human health in the Lombardy region in Italy. Frontiers in Environmental Science, 12, 1369678.
Rohde, R. A., & Muller, R. A. (2015). Air pollution in China: Mapping of concentrations and sources. PLoS ONE, 10(8), e0135749.
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