L’argine spezzato. Lama Picone e la città di carta

Technically speaking, Lama Picone is not a river. Like all the lame – the dry ravines that cut through the Bari basin – it is a groove carved by time: usually parched, yet ready to turn into a torrent whenever, especially in autumn, the sky bruises and rain becomes relentless. It was no coincidence that the French historian Fernand Braudel once described the Mediterranean climate as a “two-stroke engine (motore a due tempi)”: months of absolute drought followed, all of a sudden, by floods that tear through the soil and sweep everything away. The photograph of the collapsed embankment in 1926 captures the instant when that fragile boundary between city and nature finally gave way.
And yet the lame were not invisible to the law. As early as the Decreto Regio of 1865, and again in 1904, they had been recognised as public waterways, subject to hydraulic regulation and oversight. But, as often happens, legislation proved powerless against the fever of construction. By the end of the nineteenth century, the Libertà district had spread dangerously close to Lama Picone: rows of workers’ houses, narrow streets, poor sanitation. It was an expansion that ignored the warnings of the Corps of Civil Engineers (Genio Civile) and the High Council of Public Works (Consiglio Superiore dei Lavori Pubblici), which in 1867 had already urged the city to correct water drainage and reclaim the Marisabella marsh, on whose edge the new neighbourhood was rising.
So when Picone’s embankment collapsed, the flood struck a quarter that was already vulnerable – built, quite literally, inside a riverbed the city had chosen to forget. The lama, once silent, began to roar again. In the aftermath, even the engineers could not agree on the cause. Pio Alberto Nencha spoke of a foretold catastrophe: if the flood “did not cause the same damage as that of 1915, it was only because the settlement had not yet invaded, as it does today, the bed of the torrent (non produsse i danni di quest’ultima [scil. verificatasi nel 1915] fu perché l’abitato non aveva ancora invaso, come oggi, il letto del torrente).” Gaetano Valente, more indulgent, described it instead as a «sleeping stream (torrente addormentato)», erased from collective memory. Two opposing views, revealing more of the political hesitation than of the hydrological truth.
After the disaster came the grand works: the widening of Lama Picone by over thirty metres, the diversion of nearby Lama Lamasinata further west, the channelling of other watercourses deemed dangerous. Vast, costly measures – yet all too late. They treated the symptoms, not the disease: an urban growth too chaotic to respect the land’s own geology.
The collapse of the Picone embankment in November 1926 thus remains the emblem of a deeper rupture: between a city growing too quickly and the natural landscape that no technical illusion could ever erase.

___Stefano Daniele & Francesco Paolo de Ceglia