Museum of the Republic of Bosgattìa

❝Between the 1940s and 1950s, on a small island in the middle of the Po, a small community of dreamers proclaimed a free State with its own laws, passports, coins, and stamps. This world was suspended between imagination and reality, immersed in beautiful landscapes and interacting with an emerging form of cultural tourism. Where the water marked the rhythms of the days, the few inhabitants of Bosgattìa lived quietly, getting everything they needed to live from the riverlands.❞

The slow flow of the river Po brings with it many stories, some are fantastical, born from the myths and legends of the ancient world and others are imaginative, because they are connected to the creativity and dreams of those who lived there or who visited it, treating it with love and respect. One of the most unique and fascinating stories in the Polesine area is that of professor Luigi Salvini, a world-famous Slavist who achieved his Rousseauian dream on an island that the great river formed at Panarella di Papozze, immediately after the stretch between the Po di Venezia and the Po di Goro. The scholar, in the 1940s and 1950s, established an autonomous state, the so-called "Tamisiana Repubblica di Bosgattìa". A fictitious coin called a çievaloro was also created. The Republic was initially frequented by friends of the linguist who wanted to spend the summer holidays in close contact with nature, without rules except those of respect and mutual solidarity. Later the site became the destination of numerous visitors, attracted by the uniqueness of this experience.
Professor Salvini found the two great loves of his life in the Delta: his wife and the beauty of a pristine land, which he decided to share with friends. And so the Panarella floodplain, with its wild and ever-changing charm, at the mercy of changes in the river, became the location of the utopian river state: a unique experience, told by the Slavist himself in his book Una tenda in riva al Po (A tent on the banks of the Po).
Those who came to the Republic of Bosgattia had to adapt to what nature offered in order to survive, devoting themselves to hunting and above all to fishing. In this regard, the term in dialect "Bosgattìa" could be misleading, because in the Polesano dialect "bosgato" means pig, but a clarification comes from Salvini himself when he writes: "If you ask the Bosgattians today why they allude to Tamiso or Bosgatto, they will explain to you with a hard face [...] how they no longer refer so much to that most useful and misunderstood of domestic animals, sacrificed to human greed and ingratitude, but rather to the sturgeon, the fattest and largest of river preys, which they pursue, in truth, without too much luck”.
In 2015, a small museum dedicated to Salvini's river Republic was inaugurated in Corte Milana, in the locality of Marcanta di Papozze. The exhibition is housed in the former sacristy of the small church dedicated to Saint Justina of Padua (according to tradition Saint Justina was born in this area), built in 1923 on the commission of the composer Nino Cattozzo, professor Salvini's father-in-law.