The lagoon edge is dotted with the mysterious and seductive presence of tamarisk trees. Without shadows, because in the wilderness habitat they grow only as low shrubs, the tamarisks mark and draw the blurred-line between land and water, giving a landscape consistency to the edge.
The tamarisks explain in between space the lagoon and the coast. It is that coast which today is the reclaimed countryside, but was once the flooded forest, the lowland forest in the large region of wetlands. It is that Silva Lupanica told by Pliny the Elder and Virgil, when the Via Annia was then the border between land and water,
and the tamarisks were, with the maritime pines, the horizon of the first landscape
of the Roman consular roads.
Already then, tamarisks were witnesses of the first formalized ideas of landscape,
they were the privileged subjects of itineraria picta, and they have remained intact
to this day.
The issue starts from this tree which characterizes the lagoon landscape and illustrates
the design for the redevelopment of Riva San Vito in Marano Lagunare.
