> I guess Italy has a lot of old buildings, and Mussolini & co. didn't care about these ones.
Yes and no, while Italy has lots of old buildings, that wasn't the reason here to overlook destroying those.
Rather, this was the newly annexed province with a population speaking natively German (or better a German dialect related to the Bavarian one). Mussolini tried hard to subdue the population, forbidding also to teach German in schools for a time, which resulted in the "Katakombenschulen", schools in the underground which taught childern in German secretly.
So where to carry out destructive projects to build power plants and the-like than in the freshly annexed area?
Mussolini moved lots of Italians from the south to that area to enforce Italianisation, those people often were forced to do so and coming from a totally different climate they struggled with the harsh winters in the mid of the Alps.
Quite the messed up period which lasted, at least to some degree, even after Mussolini's death.
Well, without any kind of language or racial conflict, we (in Italy) do have a few such villages (or anyway buildings/farms/etc.) that were submerged when building new basins/artificial lakes (for hydro power plants or for regulating rivers, etc.).
The basin was due to be emptied for the first time in 2021 (after last time in 1994) but will probably be postponed to 2022.
If you think about it, it is pretty much "normal", ancient villages were either built on top of hills (that guaranteed better defense) or in the middle of valleys crossed by a river (that guaranteed water in abundance).
You build dams to use the valley as basin, so if there is a village/bulding in it it all depends on the current (at the time of the project) architectural/landscape/historical sensibility of the society to either abandon the project, move/relocate the buildings ( like to make a famous reference Abu Simbel in Egypt) or submerse everything.
As another (small) example in Tuscany, when the lake of Bilancino was built in the 1980's, everything in the valley was submersed (to be fair very few buildings of dubious historical value existed in the area) but a monumental gate was moved on another area, at a higher level:
I live in house that was built in the 13th century (also in Tuscany), which isn't typical, but as far as I know the building isn't of any historical significance whatsoever.
I'm no hurry to have it submerged, but I can see how various past administrations didn't think much of doing so. For a more striking example, after the second world war there was an effort to empty out the inhabitants living in precarious conditions in prehistoric dwellings in Matera (and those are almost ten thousand years old).
The submersion of (historical) buildings/villages is all about "how much they are valued?/how much does it cost to save them?" and "are we ready to spend that klnd of money?".
The latter example is a different thing, it is "health" related, just like the norms amd Laws about houses, specifying the the minimal requirements to be able to call a house "habitable", or suitable for humans to live in, that evolved during the years and nowadays are in Italy among - believe - the strictest ones, see this old post of mine that lists some of the base requirements:
Matera was an example of extraordinarily old dwellings even for Italy, not of the decision making process (sorry, that was a bit unclear).
The decision was in part health-and-safety related and in part a political issue of "people technically living in caverns makes us look bad" - the idea of fixing the living conditions in the Sassi instead of moving people in newly built houses was far from the sensibilities of the time.
Yes and no, while Italy has lots of old buildings, that wasn't the reason here to overlook destroying those.
Rather, this was the newly annexed province with a population speaking natively German (or better a German dialect related to the Bavarian one). Mussolini tried hard to subdue the population, forbidding also to teach German in schools for a time, which resulted in the "Katakombenschulen", schools in the underground which taught childern in German secretly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katakombenschule
So where to carry out destructive projects to build power plants and the-like than in the freshly annexed area? Mussolini moved lots of Italians from the south to that area to enforce Italianisation, those people often were forced to do so and coming from a totally different climate they struggled with the harsh winters in the mid of the Alps.
Quite the messed up period which lasted, at least to some degree, even after Mussolini's death.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italianization_of_South_Tyrol