Bentivoglio

Until 1 January 1886 this comune of the Bolognese plain was named after one of its own hamlets, Santa Maria in Duno — and the coat of arms still alludes to that name, since duno means «thorn». Then it took the name of a family that had lost Bologna almost four hundred years earlier, the Bentivoglio, and the reason stands at the centre of the village: the castle that Giovanni II Bentivoglio, lord of Bologna, had built between 1475 and 1481 around the old communal tower. He called it Domus Jocunditatis, house of gladness, and indeed it is a country house without much concern for defence, where in 1502 Lucrezia Borgia stopped on her way to Ferrara to marry Alfonso I d'Este. Inside there is a cycle of frescoes that speaks neither of wars nor of coats of arms, but of bread: the Stories of Bread, illustrating every stage of the making, from the field to the table.

What one sees today, however, is largely nineteenth-century. Between 1889 and 1897 Alfonso Rubbiani restored the castle, rebuilding the collapsed wing and the crenellated wall, respecting the old plans but inventing a good many details — the entrance ravelin, the stair that climbs to the piano nobile — and adding two statues of Giovanni II and Ginevra Sforza: the mark of his own century on one of the principal works of the Bolognese Renaissance. In 1945, as it withdrew, the Wehrmacht blew up the fourteenth-century tower to remove the high points from which one could watch. Today the castle houses the research laboratories of the Ramazzini Institute. The village, meanwhile, owes everything to the Navile canal, which carried goods towards the Po and Venice: as late as 1930 the rice of the Bentivoglio paddies reached Bologna on barges.