Deviatore Marecchia — the Canal that Took the River Away from Rimini

History

The Marecchia used to run into Rimini. Its old bed is the ground the Parco urbano XXV Aprile now occupies, and from there it emptied into the port canal, in the middle of the city. The historian Andrea Montemaggi has described what that meant for the Borgo San Giuliano on the far bank: flooding often enough that households kept boards on the ground floor to bar the water from the doors. In 1910 Rimini suffered an inundation that his account compares directly with the one of May 2023.

The problem had been studied since papal times. The first practical move came in the 1900s with the founding of the Consorzio del Marecchia, which could do nothing about the disaster of 1910 — and that failure started the campaign for what was then called the scaricatore, the overflow channel, known to everyone in dialect as e taj de fiòmm, the cut of the river. The Genio Civile of Forlì drew a project in 1919; the Bonomi government approved and financed it on 22 January 1922. Rimini’s socialist administration welcomed the first works for a reason beyond flooding: building embankments and draining the surrounding water would also clean up quarters that had no sewers at all.

Under Fascism the work started slowly. In 1925 the Consiglio Superiore dei Lavori Pubblici approved a more ambitious scheme that included enlarging the port; the first substantial works followed in 1927 under the podestà Busignani. In 1928 Riccardo Ravegnani, president of the port authority, set out the case in a sentence that has aged well: the Marecchia, “with its floods that are almost always sudden and violent, is a grave and permanent danger to the city, the suburbs and the countryside, and in a special way to the shipping”; diverting it into a wide channel of its own, shortening its way to the sea, was “a work of fundamental utility”. He expected it finished in three years.

It took fourteen more. Part of the Borgo San Giuliano was demolished; the digging went on only partially until 1938; and completion came in 1942, with the original design cut back. After the war the works continued, partly to repair war damage. The old river bed stayed empty until the 1970s, when the city laid out the Marecchia park on it.

When did the river actually leave the city? The dates in circulation do not all agree. Andrea Montemaggi’s account has the channel completed in 1942, to a reduced version of the 1925 scheme; the regional civil-protection agency describes it as designed by the Genio Civile “straddling the Second World War”; and the Comune di Rimini, on its page about the lighthouse, states that the port canal was the mouth of the Marecchia until the river was “diverted further north in 1972”. These are not necessarily in conflict — a work of this size is finished in stages, and the final closure of the old course can come long after the new channel is dug — but we have not found a source that settles the sequence, and we prefer to say so rather than pick one date and present it as certain.

The channel is not a finished monument but a working machine, and it is maintained as one. After the flood of May 2023 — which in this province hit the Uso and the Marecchia hardest — the Rimini office of the regional Agency for Territorial Safety and Civil Protection intensified structural work on it, with €1.7 million from cohesion funds, civil-protection ordinances and regional programmes. The floodplain has been reprofiled from the mouth up to the Ponte dello Scout, driftwood brought down by the current removed, and the concrete weir under that bridge is being reinforced, with a stepped ramp below it that will aerate the water through a series of small falls and a fish pass alongside — unusual, and valuable, in a stretch this close to the sea.