CREMONA – He just needs to take a look at the river, calculate the current, recognize those unmistakable signs of flood or dryness, those extremes that only the Po is capable of granting, to tell you how much the river will rise in the next few hours or ‘how much water it will lose’, or what time the wave will pass of flood from Becca and what time will it arrive in Cremona. And always with precision of minutes and seconds. Giacomo Pattin has more than forty years of experiencei, first matured in the glorious and historic Magistrate for the Po, established after the catastrophic flood of 1951, replacing the Civil Engineers, and then column, historical memory, and great expert on the Aipo river who from May 1st, the last ‘ overseer of the Po’, will retire, and is the last, after the ‘legendary’ Luigi Maccabelli, to have had two Magistrato-Aipo experiences.
Giacomo Pattini was born in a land of not large rivers, in Aarau in Switzerlandbut he moved to the Parma area immediately and was fascinated by the Bassa, by the traditions, the colours, the flavors and the culture that revolve around the Po. At a very young age, in 1984 he joined the staff of the Magistrate for the Po in the Operations Office of Cremona with the role of ‘plumber supervisor’, in direct contact with the Great River, when each supervisor had his own custody trunk.
Del Magistrato will be a point of reference until 2002, when the body is abolished and becomes Aipo, the interregional agency for the Po, which is headed by the four regions belonging to the Po basin: Piedmont, Lombardy, Emilia and Romagna and Veneto.
The figure to whom Pattini is linked is that of the hydraulic supervisor of the Magistrate for the Po, active in the surveillance service ‘in peacetime’ and operational in the flood service in hydraulic emergencies, as during the two historic floods of the Po river in 1994 and 2000, who lived on duty on the front line, knowing the people of the floodplain and of embankments, the problems, often the inconveniences, not to mention calamities, yet Pattini has always understood and loved their certainty of living next to the river, on the river, despite everything, and becoming one of them.
Always available, at any time of day or night, historical memory of floods and droughts, linked to our newspaper by a decades-long respect, always took out the “right register with the right data, the precise ones”, perhaps written rigidly by hand and in beautiful handwriting. Friends and colleagues will celebrate it by toasting the Po.
