Mussolini's speeches: - april 25, 1938 : inauguration of the new founded city of Pomezia. - july 4, 1938, Aprilia.
Beginning in 1930, the drainage of the Pontine Marshes cleared the scrub forest,constructed a total of 16,500 km (10,300 mi) of checkerboard canals and trenches, dredged rivers, diked their banks, filled depressions, and constructed pumping stations to change the elevation in the canals where necessary. The final channel, the Mussolini Canal, empties into the Tyrrhenian Sea near Anzio. The project reached a peak in 1933 with 124000 men employed.
The government placed about 2000 families (most from northern Italy and of unimpeachable Fascist background) in standardised but carefully varied two-storey country-houses of blue stucco with tiled roofs. Each settler family was assigned a farmhouse, an oven, a plough and other agricultural tools, a stable, some cows and several hectares of land, depending on local soil fertility and the size of the family.
Mussolini used the ten-year operation for propaganda purposes. Mussolini was often photographed between workers, shirtless with a shovel in his hand, or threshing wheat at harvest time
The new towns of Littoria (1932, now Latina), Sabaudia (1934), Pontinia (1935), Aprilia (1937), and Pomezia (1939) were founded, side by side with several other small rural villages.
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