Darsena

Naviglio Grande ends in a broad basin, while Naviglio Pavese begins on the opposite side. Darsena lies between them: in Italian, this is what a harbor basin is called, where vessels could dock, unload, and wait for their next voyage. The barges, quays, and sand and gravel silos are gone, but the water still passes through the same junction.

The site was chosen because Naviglio Grande had reached the small artificial lake of Sant'Eustorgio by the city wall as early as the Middle Ages. In sixteen oh three, the Spanish governor of Milan, Pedro Enríquez de Acevedo, Count of Fuentes, ordered the lake enlarged into a proper harbor. At the same time, he was pursuing something much greater: he wanted to build a navigable canal from here to Pavia, then to the Ticino and the Po, opening a water route from Milan to the Adriatic Sea.

The government borrowed fifty thousand scudi for construction, while the remaining costs were apportioned through levies on the communities and landowners, who were promised income from trade and irrigation. The engineers enlarged Darsena and made the first section of the future Naviglio Pavese navigable. There was still much work ahead, but Fuentes decided to celebrate.

An elaborately decorated ceremonial barge—a bucintoro—was prepared for the governor. He and his retinue traveled along the completed section in it. The marble Trophy of Fuentes was erected right at the exit from Darsena. Its inscription stated that the waters of Lake Maggiore and Lake Como had already been connected to the Ticino and the Po, that the land would become more fertile, and that trade would become safer and easier.

The canal did not reach Pavia then. Costs rose, landowners disputed the levies, and the people of Pavia feared that the new route would deprive them of their former position in trade. After Fuentes died in sixteen ten, officials demanded a detailed report. A year later, his successor stopped construction, sold off the prepared materials, and diverted water from the completed sections onto the fields. Milan gained Darsena, but the ceremonial barge set off along a route that came to an end after a few kilometers.

The navigable route to Pavia was completed only in eighteen nineteen. The Trophy remained above the canal's source for a long time, until it was dismantled in eighteen seventy-two. Several marble slabs were moved to the museum at Sforza Castle.

The bridge with the monument is no longer here in its former form, yet it is still called Ponte del Trofeo. Naviglio Pavese begins beneath it—the very canal whose completion the inscription announced almost two centuries before the work was finished.