Calderara di Reno

Calderara di Reno has 13,148 inhabitants in the plain along the Reno, north-west of Bologna. As a comune it is young: it was set up in 1802 under the Napoleonic government with the name of San Vitale e Calderara, and only a few years later did it take in Longara and Sacerno as well. At Sacerno, though, something very old had happened: that place, which used to be called Mezzomondo, is given as the spot where in 43 before Christ Octavian, Mark Antony and Lepidus met to divide the territories of the Roman empire between them. A stone marks it, and inside the eighteenth-century church there survives a rotunda that the Benedictines had built around the ninth century.

The town's coat of arms is a family tree. The golden stag's head on a blue field belongs to the Ubaldini, the great family from the Mugello who held these lands; their heirs took the name Calderini and kept the stag heads, but in place of the Ubaldini's eight-pointed star they set a golden rose above them, so that the shield records the change of line. The chief of Anjou, the badge of the Guelph party, records instead the bond with the old comune of Bologna. Today Calderara is an industrial town, and three of the names made here are known to people who have never heard of the place: Italeri, of the model kits, Malossi, and the Minarelli engines.