The Brugneto dam, in the Trebbia valley, is the largest work of the Brugneto public aqueduct, built between 1956 and 1959 by order of the Municipality of Genoa, under the mandate of Mayor Vittorio Pertusio. It was the end of the 1950s, there was a demographic and economic boom, Genoa was growing rapidly towards 1 million inhabitants and was thirsty: it was necessary to guarantee water supplies not only to the rapidly expanding population, but also to Italsider, the large steelworks recently built in Cornigliano, whose blast furnaces drank large quantities of water. The existing private aqueducts, Nicolay and De Ferrari Galliera, built in the second half of the nineteenth century, were no longer sufficient, and it was decided to build, in record time, a new public aqueduct that would capture water in the Trebbia valley through the construction of an artificial basin. The construction of the Brugneto aqueduct was a great engineering feat. but above all an epic of men. The project of the work, dam and aqueduct, was entrusted by the Municipality to Amga, the municipal water and gas company, which had excellent professionalism among its managers and technicians and, as happened in those times, a very high culture of work and organization. This allowed the work to be completed in exceptionally short times, making the various construction sites work day and night and coordinating numerous contractors. There were hundreds of technicians and workers engaged in various construction sites: the limestone quarry for the concrete of the enormous dam, the construction site of the dam itself, the tunnels for water supply from the new reservoir to the city. The miners of the tunnels came from Abruzzo, the wooden carpenters who fitted out the tunnels themselves from Garfagnana, other technicians were from Brescia, others from Calabria. There was great collaboration and amalgamation was created. In the end, a great work was built: the artificial lake of Brugneto is 3 km long and 77 meters deep, the dam is 260 meters wide and contains 25 million cubic meters of water, and from the dam to the city there is a 16 km pipeline almost entirely dug in a tunnel. Vittorio Sardo, born in 1932, took part in this epic with the role of director surveyor topographer of the tunnels, in the team of the works management headed by the engineer Ugo Bossi. Sardo, after 3 years as an employee of the Province of Genoa as a temporary daytime assistant, was hired by Amga in 1956, at the age of 24, with a competition aimed specifically at finding professionals to employ in the construction of the Brugneto: his delicate role was to guarantee the slope of the tunnels, imperceptible: 1 per thousand, or 1 millimeter of slope every meter. Extremely precise work that required measurements and checks in the utmost silence and concentration, that is, on Sunday mornings, the only time when teams of workers were not at work in the tunnels. The tunnels were started from opposite sides of the mountain: the meeting between the two arms had to be perfect and when the moment of the explosion of the last diaphragm arrived everyone held their breath. Sardo remembers that the junction between the two arms of the last of the three tunnels was perfect: only 35 millimetres of misalignment of the axes, an exceptional job that everyone was proud of. The great work of Brugneto had a strong impact on the poor territory of the Trebbia Valley, inhabited by farmers who practiced mountain agriculture: many roads and mule tracks, for example, were submerged by the flooding of the artificial basin. However, the local populations were not compensated with any benefit, because at the time what today are called compensation works were not yet foreseen. For example, although the dam and tunnel construction sites were served by very high voltage power lines, no one thought of bringing electricity to the small hamlets in the area, where there were very low voltage lines barely enough to turn on a light bulb and a carpenter couldn't even have an electric saw. Public water is still an important resource today: in 2017, the Metropolitan City of Genoa cut the water bill for municipalities and public swimming pools, because sport has a social value. For these users, water, which previously cost around 2.5 euros per cubic meter, now costs just over 1 euro. © 2017 Digital Communications Office Metropolitan City of Genoa http://www.cittametropolitana.genova.it #GenovaMetropoli #water #environment Subscribe to our channel to stay up to date: http://bit.ly/subcittametropolitanadi... Subtitles by Massimo Cevasco