[Constructing resonance in a polluted area: the case of 'Rolando da Piazzola' (Veneto Region, Northern Italy)]

Environmental pollution in the site of the high school 'Rolando da Piazzola' in Piazzola sul Brenta (Padua, Veneto Region, Northern Italy) was discovered by chance in 2020. Since then, investigations on the environmental damage have been ongoing, while the school is anyway working. The purpose of this article is twofold. On the one hand, to narrate the stratification uses in the area from 1891 to nowadays: a story accounting for both the processing of chemical fertilizers at the origin of pollution and its oblivion between the 1960s and 1980s. On the other hand, to shed light on such forgotten memories by recovering last-century narratives and current voices on the past, thus providing a first assessment of a work in progress. The industrial legacy and the sudden change of use of the area itself exhibit a 'cognitive dissonance' between the harmfulness of the place, known to the population since the factory was active, and the inertia of top-down projects, passed in the name of interests and variously conceived notion of development. Such dissonance is now to be grasped by the school, in the light of an ecological view. The participatory reasoning on the environmental and health risks alludes to the civic mission of the school and calls for a syntonic relationship with the territory. These operations require a resonance inside and outside the institute, which has still not been found. What is at stake is the need to reconnect the memory between generations and the relationships between human and non-human entities (i.e., the environment). On these basis, it would be possible to build some scientific citizenship that can face uncertainty without paralyzing effect, but in a new, transparent, and horizontal narrative about the sense of a place and of itself.