Baricella

Baricella owes its name to the border police. The place name comes from Barigella, and Barigella from the bargelli, the officers in charge of policing and of fiscal control, who at the beginning of the fourteenth century had put their seat here to watch the traffic between the territory of Bologna and that of Ferrara. One of the buildings in the town is still called the palazzo della Dogana, the customs house. The rest is told by the arms, which never had an official grant: there is a battana, the flat-bottomed boat of the marshes, there is a fish alluding to the fishing that was practised in the waters of the Savena and the Reno, and there is the Angevin chief, symbol of the Guelph party, taken from the arms of Bologna to say whom the place depended on.

It is a town of low plain and governed water, and its civil architecture is half hydraulic: the chiaviche, that is the sluice gates of the canals, like the old one at Gandazzolo and the one at Portoni; the ice house of villa Baracca; the Bailey bridge over the Reno at Passo Segni, one of those demountable military bridges left in place after the war; and the former tramway station, because between 1891 and 1957 the line to Bologna stopped here. Part of the territory is protected ground, inside the site of biotopes and environmental restorations that Baricella shares with Bentivoglio, San Pietro in Casale and Malalbergo; and there are monumental trees listed one by one: a Carolina poplar at Boschi, a pedunculate oak in via Savena Vecchia at Mondonuovo, two white poplars.