Rewriting the Polesine Flood: Gender and Ecology in Sonia Aggio’s Magnificat

On 14 November 1951, the Polesine basin experienced one of the most severe floods recorded in modern Italian history. Despite its historical significance, the event remains marginal in environmental humanities scholarship. This article examines Magnificat (2022) by Sonia Aggio, a novel that reimagines the 1951 flood. Drawing on posthuman feminism and Astrida Neimanis’ phenomenology, we argue that Magnificat addresses the historiographical absence of women’s voices while challenging anthropocentric and androcentric disaster narratives. The novel achieves this by dissolving boundaries between human and nonhuman entities, particularly bodies of water, and reframing the Po River not as a destructive force but as a subject resisting human colonization. The article first explores the literary legacy of the Polesine flood before analysing Magnificat as a case of feminist storytelling that redefines both history and ecology.