Plain with waterways and marshlands: nature sites

If you have the chance to fly over the Pianura Veronese with a small ultralight plane you may notice, without any difficulty, the great abundance of waterways still dotting the landscape today. You may look at the warp and weft formed by those long silver ribbons. Fortunately for those living around there, embankments and several hydraulic regulator devices are guarding the river flows today.

It was not always like that: once the rivers of the plain flowed freely, subject to the vagaries of the seasons. We should imagine, not without a little effort, a surrounding lush vegetation: in some spots thick and impenetrable, in other spots dotted only by small ponds and, scattered through woods and swamps, small villages.

Both the slow and patient human labour and the farmland development undertaken since the fifteenth century have almost completely destroyed the typical natural environment of the Pianura Veronese. Only some small yet precious traces remind of that ancient past: they are remarkable corners where a careful eye can even today admire relics of an old and now disappeared land.

They are open protected areas and nature sites, such as the nature reserve and marshland Brusà-Vallette in Cerea: Brusà is the last land strip of the ancient river Menago swamp and Vallette is an ecological and artificial land strip built on the old bed of the river Menago. Or the Busatello swamp in Gazzo Veronese, where the river Tione flows into the river Tartaro. These last relics of a distant past remind the modern traveller of the huge millennia-old marshland in Valli Grandi Veronesi. The Tartaro wood, “Bosco del Tartaro”, located in Torrette near Legnago, as well as the botanical gardens in the floodplain of the river Adige have recreated some typical wooded areas of the Po Valley.