Dante wrote about the disease and desolation that struck the Maremma during the middle ages in The Divine Comedy, because the lush farmland that had fed the Etruscans and Romans for generations had been blighted by malaria and constant flooding, which decimated the region for centuries. Towns were impoverished and abandoned, bandits rules, and farmland was destroyed.

Great minds including Da Vinci and Gallileo proposed hydraulic solutions which failed, but in 1829 a great State funded project began which included a massive system of sluices, canals and basins. The work finished with the establishment of the Land Reclamation Authority in the 1930s which laid roads and rebuilt towns and established farming centers, but the initial success was credited to a local horseman and farmer, two uneducated men who observed and understood the way the rain and flooding moved across the land, and learned how to direct it.