Castello d'Argile

The old name is Argile, and it appears in documents from 946: it probably comes from the Latin argiletum, that is from a place full of clay, which this was, because here the Reno used to spread its waters. The other explanations — from argine, an embankment, or from agger viae, a road bed — are rejected by the sources: between Argile and Argelato there is no trace, either in the documents or in the ground, of old embankments or roadways. The word Castello was added in 1380: the settlement that stood further west had been destroyed in 1351 by Visconti troops, and the comune of Bologna ordered and paid for it to be rebuilt where the village now stands, in the shape of a castrum — a rectangle with a ditch and a wooden palisade around it and two gates, one north and one south, with drawbridges.

The comune is not all in one piece: besides the main village and Venezzano-Mascarino there is Bagnetto, a strip of land beyond the Reno that can only be reached by crossing another comune, and a long thin strip called simply the Administrative Island, likewise detached. This is the river's doing. Around 1660 a new stretch of the Reno was dug to cut off a dangerous bend, and for some decades Bagnetto stayed completely surrounded by the old and new courses of the Reno and the Samoggia. Nor are the boundaries to north and south natural: they run jagged and irregular because they were drawn long ago by dividing up the families, each one put under one jurisdiction or another. In 1662 it happened again: the territory of Venezzano was cut back and forty families went back under the neighbouring comune.