Between May 16 and 17, 2023, devastating floodings engulfed the Italian region of Emilia-Romagna, provocating 15 victims, leaving more than 36,000 thousand homeless, and resulting in about a thousand landslides, hundreds of streets interrupted, and collapsed bridges. Nearly two dozen rivers overflew between the Appenine Mountains and the Adriatic Coast, inundating the fields and many cities in Romagna, including the Emilian city of Bologna and its metropolitan area. The rivers received in thirty-six hours about half the annual average rainfall, an event labeled by experts as Italy’s worst flood in a century and whose consequences have been worsened by the preceding period of prolonged and intense drought that made the soil less absorbent, unveiling structural maintenance negligence and leaving us once again facing the intensifying consequences of climate change.

Argini is a visual testimony of the latter disastrous climate event conducted by the Emilian photographer Marco Zanella, author of the book ‘Scalandrê’ (2021), a three-year project focused on the rural territory of Cotignola, a small town in Romagna with a solid agricultural tradition threatened by a rapidly changing world. Zanella thus returned to his beloved Romagna to document the consequences of the flooding that gravely damaged entire towns, destroyed many of its fields, and displaced countless inhabitants.

This publication also serves to raise funds for the areas affected by the floods, with 50% of the sales proceeds donated to the Giuseppe Sarti Music School in Faenza.

The fanzine is the second edition of the Dispacci series, created by Cesura Publish to imprint Italian news chronicles on the newsprint paper.

Argini is part of a project carried out by Gallerie d’Italia, Intesa Sanpaolo’s museums.