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“It is difficult not to feel like a stranger while traveling the Po Valley countryside”(Towards the River’s Mouth, 1). 1 The speaker of these lines is a native writer, Gianni Celati, who was born in Sondrio, Lombardy, and grew up in Ferrara, near the river’s mouth. In such a rich and culturally specific bioregion, one in which territorial stances based on place identity led an autonomist party called the Northern League in the government coalition, a native feels like a stranger. Why might this be so? Maybe because a profound crisis, both cultural and ecological, is fatally affecting these places, a crisis stunningly visible in the landscape’s decline: once the heart of a fertile country and of potentially harmonious comingling of nature and urbanization, the Po River Valley is now one of Europe’s most polluted fluvial areas. How to respond to this crisis? The autonomist proposals have so far proven inadequate. They have, in fact, little to do with the protection of an endangered heritage, serving rather an ideology of territorialism, industrial development, local privilege, and xenophobia. But if a cultural survival strategy is required, bioregionalism might, in turn, become a valuable tool. Bioregional narratives, in particular, can be used as tools to “restore the imagination” of place, namely, to understand and to orient the evolutionary dynamics connected to the life of place, involving an open and more inclusive reflection on identity, history, and ecology.