Ivrea is a river city: held between two banks, and in turn enclosed within a moraine amphitheater where water is very much the protagonist. In short, Ivrea owes the Dora Baltea a great deal — its very founding, a significant part of its economic vitality across the centuries, and, not least, many of the compliments it receives every day for its beauty.
And it is, after all, a remarkable river — one of the most important in north-western Italy, crossing the Aosta Valley and part of Piedmont, passing through Ivrea and Chivasso, before joining the Po after some 160 kilometres, on the plain near Crescentino.
Born of the glacial waters that rise at the foot of Mont Blanc, Monte Rosa and Gran Paradiso, the Dora Baltea traces one of its most striking stretches through Ivrea, where it has always played a central role in shaping the city’s identity. It winds through the urban fabric, creating views worth pausing for, mirroring bridges, historic buildings and green spaces as it goes. At times placid, at times forceful, it has, over the centuries, driven the growth of local industry and helped the community thrive: locked in a kind of embrace with the water, Ivrea gave rise to countless pieces of infrastructure — the river port and the Pons Maior in Roman times, floating mills and the Naviglio canal in the medieval period, to name only a few.
Yet for the people of Ivrea, the Dora is not just a natural, historical or economic feature: it is also an extraordinary part of their identity, a daily “generator” of belonging. Perhaps no one has put it better than Francesco Carandini, in a passage from La vigna del Cristo, a short story in his 1919 collection Parella. Here, the author seems almost to trace the psychological contours of this intense relationship between Ivrea and its water:
“I listened to it all from my wide-open window, alone and without anyone knowing, because I should have been in bed — but who could resist a moon like that? So I sat on the windowsill, hidden by the glossy leaves of the magnolia. I was as if enchanted, and I had the feeling that the Dora, with its soft murmur, was carrying away a part of me — of all of us who lived quietly in that divine corner of the world — carrying it far off, toward some greyness I didn’t want to know, because my heart and my whole being were, even then, filled with an immense love for those places; I felt bound to those mountains, those waters, those woods, as if I were one and the same with them, and I sensed, even then, the cruel anguish of the day I would have to leave them.”
One last note: the story also appears in the more recent collection Memorie canavesane, published in 1963 by Libreria Gravinese. Francesco Carandini is also the author of the monumental Vecchia Ivrea, the wonderful volume published by Viassone in 1914 — an essential book for any Ivrea native passionate about the history of their city.
