Suviana's Waters: A Tragic Transformation from Idyllic Lake to Scene of Despair

“The sea is then like the basin of Suviana, only wider and longer, and there's sand, instead of silt, on the ground,” a makeshift sea but close to the heart for Francesco Guccini, even more so today when that water, invading the power plant after an explosion, has taken the lives of workers. “Unacceptable deaths,” says the grand master of music and poetry who had glorified Suviana in his novel Croniche Epafaniche. Guccini's house is still in Pàvana, a handful of kilometers and a region further on, but Suviana is an affectionate place that today, however, is one of pain. “Here I learned to swim, it is a place to which I am deeply connected, I have been there many times, even as a young man, to swim in the lake or canoe and I have many memories,” he says now that Suviana in today's news ties his name to misfortune and death. “I am shaken by the tragedy of the hydroelectric plant of Lake Suviana. It is an indescribable tragedy, a wound that causes me great suffering,” the poet and singer-songwriter lets it be known - “I am close to the families of the victims and express my condolences to them. Dying at work is unacceptable.” Thus, that magical place, also chosen to present his penultimate work among the slopes of the water park, that only sea for those who live astride the Tuscan-Emilian Apennines, is overshadowed by the misfortune of those who die just to work. The explosion, the smoke, the death, the desperate searches of the firefighters clash with that page of the Croniche in which Suviana, despite “the silt, the stench of rot” and even the carcass of a putrefied pig “down the slope before the dam” or “a dead cat in a piece of pipe,” even returns the magic of those who invent their own sea. A sea with “pebbles and glass smoothed by the wave” and even shells. Rotten those too despite the whiteness. Rotten like the clear water of Suviana, now murderous.