The boulders for the construction of the new embankments arrive
Legnano – Just look on both sides of the Via Gabinella bridge: towards Castellanza the river flows between the ruins of VM Petroli, part of a wall collapsed years ago and the vegetation that overflows the artificial banks has enveloped everything, including the hydrometer that signals when the floods risk becoming threatening. Downstream, however, it is as if the Olona had started to breathe again.
Away with the concrete
It took just over a month for the works to renovate the embankments as part of the redevelopment of the area of just under 78 thousand square meters once occupied by the Mottana and Bernocchi factories they only started last March 11th, but in recent days it is already possible to get an idea of how it will become the largest river park in Legnano: the old concrete embankments that let the water flow into the factories have been demolished, on the banks the teams are piling up the boulders that will be placed to create the boundary between the water and the land. The new embankments will be sloping, space will be left for vegetation between the boulders. To get an idea, the intervention is very similar to the one that was carried out between 2014 and 2015 on Isola del Castello. With the difference that around the island the Municipality has reorganized the natural embankments, making the castle safe and creating a clearing area where the floods find an outlet, while in the former Mottana-Bernocchi sector the private individuals will cancel the works that will eventually of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century other private individuals had built to serve the river for the purposes of the companies that were being born in the area. Along the Olona, in Legnano at the time there was a whole chain of factories: they were there from upstream to downstream the Mottana dyeworks, the Bernocchi weaving mill, the Cantoni cotton mill, the Dell’Acqua cotton mill and the Mambretti factory, between one and the other just a few streets, the indispensable space to guarantee the viability of a city that was growing at an impressive rate thanks to the factories. One hundred years and at least half a dozen floods later (the ones of 1917 and 1951 were particularly disastrous), Legnano began to think about the need to free the river from the chains that had been imposed on it, and which no longer motivated by industrial needs risked now to harm not only the environment but also people.
The environmental turning point
Ten years passed between the recovery of the Cantoni area (completed in 2009) and the former Bernocchi river park (imagined in 2019) which marked an era in terms of environmental sensitivity. In the Cantons the Olona crosses the Falcone e Borsellino park in a canal that is beautiful to look at, but which conceptually is not very different from the stretch that alongside via Guerciotti ran towards the Mambretti factory (where AbPlast is today), at the former Mottana is creating a more modern park, at the center of which there will actually be the river.
Luigi Crespi
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