Casalecchio di Reno

Casalecchio means a handful of houses: Casaliculum, «a small cluster of houses» in medieval Latin. Then that handful of houses set about governing Bologna's water. Around the year one thousand they began here to build the weir, the canale di Reno and the bridge; the dam as it stands today is of 1360, and it served to hold back the floods and send part of the river into the canal, which carried boats and turned the workshops right into Bologna — via Riva Reno takes its name from that canal, which now runs buried under the asphalt. It is one of the longest-lived hydraulic works in Europe, still in use, and UNESCO has declared it a «heritage bearing a culture of peace for the young». The weir is in the town's arms as well, beside Bologna's lion with the Libertas banner.

Next to it lies the parco della Chiusa, the former parco Talon: five hundred hectares at the foot of the hill of San Luca, with the remains of the seventeenth-century villa of the Sampieri Talon, where the people of Bologna have walked for generations. For three centuries, though, this place was above all a battlefield of Bologna's wars: on 26 June 1402 the Bolognese army of Giovanni Bentivoglio met that of Gian Galeazzo Visconti, duke of Milan, here. In the last war Casalecchio was among the most heavily bombed towns, and it rebuilt itself from scratch, growing faster than any other comune in the province, the capital included. On 6 December 1990 a military aircraft in trouble, which its pilot had abandoned in flight, fell on a branch of the Salvemini institute: twelve students died. The building that was struck is today the Casa della Solidarietà, and it bears the name of Dubcek.