Giacomo Sebastiano Pedersoli
Il disastro del Gleno - 1923, un "Vajont" dimenticato

When mentioning the most severe disasters in Italian history, in addition to earthquakes and natural calamities, the Vajont is often cited as one of the most dreadful cases of negligence, dishonesty, and human folly that the average Italian can recall.

However, forty years earlier, there was another case in many ways similar and which too few remember when talking about disasters due to man and his obsessions with grandeur and attachment to the Almighty Dollar: the collapse of the Monte Gleno dam, which on the morning of December 1, 1923, struck two valleys in Lombardy, the Val di Scalve and Val Camonica, causing the death of nearly four hundred people (but these were only the numbers of bodies found) and the complete destruction of all the villages in the Bergamo valley and the hamlet of Corna di Darfo in the Brescia area.

The book I bring to your attention talks in detail about all of this, from the absurd errors made during the construction phase of the dam, which was a private initiative of the Galeazzo Viganò company from Ponte Albiate (MI), to the list of the severe damages inflicted on the practically annihilated villages both in terms of population and properties.

If built well, it would have been one of the most modern and interesting constructions of its kind; unfortunately, however, it was built on a budget, with completely unsuitable materials and without taking into account the most basic safety standards even by the laws of that time, furthermore, with the cheerful blessing of the complacent Civil Engineering of those days.

However, everything was hushed up by a scandalous trial followed by an even more scandalous verdict in which the defendants belonging to the aforementioned company were acquitted or at most served a few months in jail.

Here, everything is truly recounted, from the start of work with the meticulous description of all the shortcomings and negligence during the construction, to the fears and all the doubts of the population, who lived then in dire poverty and were kept in the dark about everything, to those dreadful 7:15 a.m. of that morning on December 1, 1923, when the dam burst releasing about 6 million cubic meters of water downstream, to the terrible days that followed.

There is also talk of the newspaper articles that appeared in those days, all inevitably focused on "fate" and "disaster," as well as space given to the testimonies of the workers, some of whom reported severe deficiencies during the construction phase and said during the trial that they could not speak out during the work, under the threat of immediate dismissal, and also to the testimonies of the few remaining surviving inhabitants.

Then, forty years later, came the Vajont tragedy: clearly, for some, history teaches absolutely nothing...