Giovanni Battista Venturi was born in 1746 in Bibbiano, a small village in the Province of Reggio Emilia, Italy. At the age of 23, he was ordained as a Catholic priest and, in the same year, was appointed as a teacher of logic at the University of Reggio Emilia. In 1774, he moved to the University of Modena as a professor of geometry and philosophy. Over the next years, Venturi would also have success as a university-level mathematics instructor, a civil engineer, a politician, a statesman, a confidant of Napoleon I Bonaparte, and, in later years, as a renowned historian.

The discovery of diamonds in 1869 and of gold in 1886, and the influx of several thousand fortune seekers which followed these events created new markets for grain products in Kimberley and the Witwatersrand. This, in turn, encouraged the cultivation of wheat and mealies in the Free State and Basutoland (Lesotho).

With the recent heavy downpours in Bloemfontein and the images and videos thereof popping up all over Facebook, one cannot help but be reminded of one of the biggest disasters to ever hit Bloemfontein, the flood of 1904.

In the early years of Bloemfontein its famous Bloem Spruit regularly flooded its banks after a heavy rainstorm. One bystander described it as follows: “A magnificent sight after a good downpour, the water, brown and foaming, shooting up as it flung itself against the huge boulders in its way, or swirling and eddying around them.” This, however, was under normal circumstances.