[sonofatpatcher2]

I'm with you, Val... Where did the lake go?

I've tried Googling "6th"+"1850"+" lake"+"Italy" and got nothing to help.

[SunkenCiv]

The lake was drained in 1850, part of a major campaign to rid Tuscany of malaria. The Arno river has flooded a number of times, sometimes dangerously, most recently in, hmm, late 1940s or early 1950s. 500 years ago, Leonardo da Vinci came up with a canal idea which would have controlled Arno flooding, provided agricultural irrigation (and an income source from same), permitted Florence to become a sea power, and cut off Pisa's water supply during one of the intermittent wars between those two cities. An idiot relative of some politician was chosen as contractor, and he screwed it up so bad that the project was ruined.

Thanks Val for pingin' me here.

Fortune Is a River: Leonardo Da Vinci and Niccolo Machiavelli's Magnificent Dream to Change the Course of Florentine History by Roger D. Masters

George W. Bush will be reelected by a margin of at least ten per cent