Cervia Salt Pans: An Open-Air Museum

The ancient salt pan of Cervia is an open-air museum, from which you can start discovering a fascinating wetland area, the southern gateway of the Po Delta Park, and a welcoming and sunny town like Cervia, whose history has been written by the “white gold” itself.

The sunset lights up the salt pan with a thousand shades of red; seagulls and terns tirelessly circle over the water mirrors, and the spectacle is almost speechless. But Africo Ridolfi, born in 1935, fourth generation of a well-known family of salt workers, seems unaware of it; his eyes and arms are all dedicated to his gavaro , the ancient wooden rake with which he piles the salt at the edges of the last basin, waiting for one of his companions to come and collect it with a sturdy shovel and place it in the paniera, the typical basket of the salt workers, to transfer it onto a creaky carriolo and deposit it on the white pile, the result of the daily harvest.

Every year, from June to September, in Cervia, on the Romagna beaches, where classic seaside rituals take place, Africo and the volunteers of the “Civiltà Salinara” group spend the summer continuing the work with traditional tools and methods (the “multiple harvest,” already practiced in Etruscan times, where seawater, moving from one evaporation basin to another, becomes pure salt), the last artisanal salt pan surviving the passage of time, a true open-air museum, producing a white gold called Cervia’s “sweet” salt.

“The salt we harvest here at Camillone, this is the curious name of the salt pan, has the characteristic of having a low concentration of potassium and the more bitter salts, which leave that typical slightly bitter aftertaste on the palate,” Africo explains with understandable pride. “For this reason, it is especially appreciated in restaurants and in the preparation of cured meats and cheeses. It is also a whole salt, as it is naturally dried, maintaining all the trace elements (iodine, zinc, copper, manganese) present in seawater.”

Salt has written the history of its city; Africo remembers very well the 144 private salt pans that thrived until the late 1950s, when the Monopoly transformed them into a single large salt pan of 827 hectares, sparing only the small Camillone, whose sweet salt now enjoys a moment of glory with the awarding of a Slow Food presidium.

Not far away, beyond the Adriatic state road, rises the yellow bulk of the modern Salt Facilities, where most of the Cervia salt production takes place, about 6,000 tons per year. Decommissioned by the Monopoly in the late ’90s, the facilities continue to produce today thanks to the creation of the “Parco della Salina di Cervia” company, which also manages the nearby Visitor Center, from where you can start exploring the southernmost part of the Po Delta Park, a fascinating and rich wetland area, home to foxes, terns, avocets, royal and common gulls, flamingos, black-winged stilts, and many other resident and migratory bird species.

Inside the facilities, there is an interesting shop where you can find salt packaged in canvas bags or in fine ceramics with traditional decoration; aromatic salt with Romagna herbs, excellent for seasoning meats and fish; chocolate bars with sweet salt, whose flavor recalls the traditional bread and chocolate; relaxing and toning bath salts, traditionally used for body care along with mud and mother water, as has been done for centuries at the local spas.