Renzo Rosso

In Italy, like no other country, national history has been associated with natural and non-natural disasters. Amongst natural disasters, floods are the most widespread and have left a profound mark on the territory and life of the people, society and politics. If the Italian “hydrogeological question” from the Unity to today is therefore hydraulic, geological, civil and political history together, it has almost always been confronted by prioritising the urgent over the important, without knowledge of the past and with a modest vision of the future. Explaining some of the thematic paradigms that have occurred in history, Renzo Rosso will draw a picture that encompasses various periods and places, where people, politics, scientists and technicians are protagonists and victims, saviors and saved, illusionists and damned, filtering the different facets of the issue through a rational scientific lens and revealing the point of view from which we could address the issue.

is full professor at the Faculty of Hydrology of the Milan Polytechnic since 1986. Author of monographs and scientific texts, he has published more than 400 works on hydrology, climatology, hydraulic engineering and applied statistics in major international journals, receiving various scientific awards (Legambiente Prize 2002; Borland Lecture Award, 2005; Henry Darcy Medal, 2010; Italian Hydrology Society, 2015). His best known books are Effetto serra. Istruzioni per l’uso (Progetto Leonardo, 1994), Statistics, Probability and Reliability for Civil and Environmental Engineers (McGraw-Hill, 1997), Extremes in Nature (Springer, 2007), Applied Statistics for Civil and Environmental Engineers (Blackwell-Wiley, 2008), Bisagno. Il fiume nascosto (Marsilio, 2014) and Bombe d’acqua. Alluvioni d’Italia dall’unità al terzo millennio (Marsilio, 2017). Editorialist of Il Secolo XIX, he runs a blog on Il Fatto Quotidiano and has also published a novel (The star grabber, l’uomo che rastrellava le stelle, Il Melangolo, 2015).