A drought-ridden Italian town has contracted a mystic to search for groundwater with the help of a pendulum amid record-setting heat waves across Europe.
Bajardo, a small town on the Ligurian coast with fewer than 350 people, promised to pay a man named Renato Labolani €300 ($297) to perform a “water survey with an agricultural psychic method,” according to the municipal contract.
Labolani practices dowsing – a method of detecting groundwater by using a forked stick, a rod or a pendulum. Most dowsers believe that they are picking up natural vibrations from the water underneath the soil.
“I use a pendulum that tells me everything: where the water is, how much of it there is, how deep it is,” Labolani, who has 30 years of experience in the field, told newspaper Il Foglio on Tuesday.
“I ask the question: how much [water] is in this area? Five hundred liters, a thousand, three thousand? I walk as long as the pendulum is moving, and then it stops.”
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