There is not a soul in the Museum of the Po River and Inland Navigation in Boretto.

The 5,000 inhabitants of the town, which is located near Parma directly on the south bank of the Po, prefer to spend the hot summer weekend at home or on a trip to the countryside.

Some of the rusty ships exhibited in the museum could not currently sail on the Po.

The lowest water level in 70 years was measured these days at the measuring station of the interregional authority for the river Po in Boretto.

Matthias Rub

Political correspondent for Italy, the Vatican, Albania and Malta based in Rome.

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The reason for the low is the ongoing drought in northern Italy, which is now accompanied by the first heat wave of early summer.

In addition, it hardly snowed in the mountains in winter, so that the tributaries carried too little meltwater from the southern side of the Alps and from the Dolomites into the Po.

The water levels of Lake Como and Lake Maggiore have also fallen sharply.

Meanwhile, agriculture in the fertile Po Valley, which generates about a third of Italy's agricultural output, and the region's growing cities and modern industries are growing thirsty.

Around 40 percent of the country's economic output is generated on the outskirts and in the large plain of the Po.

The longest river in Italy stretches over 650 kilometers from its source in the Cottian Alps near the French border to the delta estuary on the Adriatic Sea.

There, the low water means that salt water from the sea pushes up the course of the river.

Hydroelectric power generation along the Po has come to a standstill.

There could also soon be problems with the cooling of conventional power plants.

The Farmers' Association Coldiretti complains about water rationing and limited irrigation of the fields.

No rain in sight

Talk of "water wars" in northern Italy may be exaggerated, but conflicts between regions are heating up.

The regions of Emilia-Romagna and Veneto in the Po Valley are demanding from the autonomous provinces of Trento and South Tyrol further north that they should take less water from the Adige and open the weirs of their reservoirs.

But there they also suffer from the water shortage.

The artificially dammed Reschensee in Vinschgau is half empty.

The famous church tower of the village of Graun, which sank in the reservoir when the high valley was flooded in 1950, is practically dry this spring.

Electricity generation is also greatly reduced at Lake Reschen due to the low water.

"We had a winter with little snow and a very dry spring," says Roberto Dinale, Director of the Office for Hydrology and Dams in Bolzano, the capital of the province of South Tyrol.

"Compared to other years, there is only about half the amount of snow on the mountains," says Dinale, which accounts for a 40 percent reduction in water flow in the Adige compared to a long-term comparison.

According to Dinale, the water withdrawal in South Tyrol and Trento does not play a decisive role in the amount of water that finally arrives in the Po Valley: "And even if we closed all drains and didn't use any additional water, that would not change the drought in Veneto very much .”

The only hope for a lasting improvement in the precarious water situation in the Po Valley would be extensive rainfall.

But according to the forecasts of the meteorologists, these are not to be expected for the time being.

Instead, it should remain hot in the summer.