Pieve di Cento

The name says it all: this town was the pieve of Cento, that is the church with the baptistery of another town, which had none. Until 1378 its church was the only one with a font in all the countryside around — still called the Centopievese — and so every other church came under it. In 1376 the bishop of Bologna, who was from here, decreed that it should be called Pieve di Cento, and two years later Cento obtained the right to build its own baptistery in the collegiate church of San Biagio. Today the two towns are a single built-up area of more than forty-three thousand people. Of Pieve the four gates are still standing — Cento, Asìa, Bologna, Ferrara — and inside the gates they have put the museums: the one of the town's stories is in the fortress and in Porta Bologna, the one of hemp in Porta Asìa.

The plain here was marsh, and what drained it was an institution that still exists: the partecipanza agraria, by which the inhabitants share the burdens, enjoy the benefits and keep the land in collective ownership. The rest is told by the sugar beet: between 1889 and 1955 Pieve di Cento was the terminus of a tramway that joined it to Bologna, used by the commuters who went to work in the city's factories and to carry away the sugar beet, of which the town was one of the main collecting centres; when the tramway was closed and replaced by buses, the museum in the fortress gave it a whole room. Administratively Pieve belonged to Ferrara until 1929, when it passed to the province of Bologna.