Stagno is a small village near Roccabianca, touched by the Big River Po.
Many years ago, in the autumn of 1951, a disconcerting event happened during a Po overflow, which destroyed part of the territories near the riverbed and shocked the Polesine.
A group of friends, around the first days of October, was celebrating a birthday on the bank. They left from Gramignazzo, village located on the Taro River, and they followed the way to reach Ragazzola, which was on the Po’s bank instead. When they reached Stagno they saw, in the distance, on the riverside, the shape of a girl with a white vest and wet hair, who was walking in the mud and in the fog. They shout at her in order to call and stop her: she was wandering in a lonely place with few clothes on, and the cold was intense.
The girl seemed like not answering, and then suddenly she disappeared behind a shrub. The boys went to the village looking for help; when they reached the first house right out of Stagno, they could not believe what they saw: the girl had preceded them and she was next to the well of the yard, standing still, wet and with the white vest on her.
One of the friends approached her and asked if she needed any help, but he could not get very close. Her blue eyes stared at the boy’s ones, and he felt stuck, stunned by the deep gaze of that beautiful figure.
The boys looked at each other and decided to leave, with no answer nor sureness, but that was the only thing they could do. Only one of them dare to turn around, and he saw the girl jumping in the well… he thought it was an illusion due to the fog and he did not ever told anything to his friends.
That same night all of them had the same dream, a dream of water, cold and darkness; a dream ending with the inundation of the village.
Two friends decided to go back to that place: the boy who looked at her in the eyes and the one who saw her jumping in the well.
There was nothing: the house was empty and the well was close.
It was the end of October. Not long after, around the middle of November, the Big River broke the banks: that was the big flood of the Po of 1951. Close to Gramignazzo one of the friends saw a white vest floating in the river and then disappearing between waves and eddies. He got that much scared that he decided to go living far from the Bassa, far from Stagno, in the Irish hills.
The boy who looked at the girl in the eyes come back to the riverside every year. Some say he never got married and never had children, because the eyes of the girl of the well stole his heart.