Malalbergo

The name of this town is a verdict, and a verdict on an inn at that. It is commonly derived from the ill-famed inn that stood here until the nineteenth century, at the point where the Navile canal lost itself in the marshes south of Ferrara: boatmen and merchants heading for Bologna or coming back found food and a bed there, and evidently did not speak well of it. Little is left of the marshes, but part of the municipal territory now falls within a protected area of biotopes and habitat restoration shared with the neighbouring comuni. Between 1891 and 1955 Malalbergo was instead the terminus of a tramway to Bologna, crowded with commuters bound for the city's works and loaded with sugar beet, of which the town was one of the main collection centres.

In the hamlet of Pegola there is a story of removals. The parish church built in 1892 along a bend of the Navile was deconsecrated in the nineteen-sixties because it had ended up too far from the houses, which meanwhile had stretched out along the Porrettana road, and today it stands in ruins; the new church was put up in 2008. One thing, however, was carried out of the old one before it fell: a painting of Saints Cosmas and Damian, the two physicians, shown in the act of the miracle of the transplanted leg, attributed to Bartolomeo Ramenghi known as il Bagnacavallo.