Padania - in Geography

In Geography

The adjective padano, derived from Padus, the Latin name of the Po river, was first used in the 19th century. In its true geographical sense, Padania refers to the valley of the Po river. In fact, the French client republics in the Po Valley during the Napoleonic era included the Cispadane Republic and the Transpadane Republic, according to the custom (appearing with the French Revolution) of naming territories on the basis of watercourses. The ancient Regio XI (the region of the Roman Empire on the current territory of the Aosta Valley, Piedmont and Lombardy) has been referred to as Regio XI Transpadana in academic literature only in recent centuries.

The term Padania has been used mainly as a socio-economic denomination as the terms Pianura Padana or Val Padana are the standard denominations in geography textbooks and atlases. The first use of the concept in socio-economic terms dates 1975, when Guido Fanti, the Communist President of Emilia-Romagna proposed a union composed of Emilia-Romagna, Veneto, Lombardy, Piedmont and Liguria. The term was seldom used in these terms until the Giovanni Agnelli Foundation re-launched it in 1992 through the volume La Padania, una regione italiana in Europa (English: Padania, an Italian region in Europe), written by various academics.

Even if Padania is often used as synonymous of Northern Italy, in a strict geographic sense it does not include Aosta Valley, Trentino, South Tyrol, Friuli-Venezia Giulia, large chunks of Veneto, Romagna, and, of course, Tuscany, Marche and Umbria, none of which are part of Northern Italy.

Beginning in the 1960s, journalist Gianni Brera used the term Padania to indicate the area that at the time of Cato the Elder corresponded to Cisalpine Gaul. At the time of Brera and later, the term Padania was considered a geographic synonym of Po Valley and as such was included in the Enciclopedia Universo in 1965 and in the Il Devoto–Oli dictionary of the Italian language in 1971. A further use of the term Padania was limited to some linguistic research, in relation to Gallo-Italic languages, sometimes even extended to all regional languages which divide Northern from Central Italy along the La Spezia–Rimini Line.

Lega Nord, a political party born in 1991 by the union of several Northern regional parties, later used the term for a similar geographical range, but with political and socio-economic connotations. Lega Nord's definition of Padania's boundaries is incidentally similar to Robert D. Putnam's "civic North". Putnam, a political scientist at Harvard University, wrote a book titled Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy, in which Italy's "civic North" is defined according to the inhabitants' civic traditions and attitudes, related to the historical emergence of the free medieval communes since the 10th century. Putnam's theory has been acknowledged by Stefano B. Galli, a Padanist political scientist close to the League and columnist for Il Giornale and La Padania, as a source for defining Padania.