Sentiero della Bonifica

Traveling slowly along the Canale Maestro della Chiana in the land of Siena and Arezzo means discovering the nature of a land that human ingenuity has stolen from water. And not only. In the great valley sink the magical roots of the Etruscan civilization.
The Val di Chiana is a land in movement and the secular work of restoration is the symbol of a continuous transformation.
The land reclamation work involved engineers, mathematicians, plumbers, cartographers, agronomists and architects: from Leonardo da Vinci to the aretine Vittorio Fossombroni, an enlightened technician who worked there for over 50 years until his death in 1844. The Canale Maestro della Chiana represents a historical hydraulic engineering work that still today plays an important role in the area. In ancient times the river "Clanis" flowed, through the river Paglia, into the Tiber flowing south. Around the eleventh century the valley began to swamp because of the slow rising of the land in the Chiusi area due to tectonic movements and deposits of erosive materials. The river "Clanis" could not flow regularly towards the Tiber, flooding the valley for five centuries.