San Giovanni in Persiceto

From 1912 to 1927 the town was called simply Persiceto: the saint had been dropped in a fit of anticlerical feeling, and later given back. The full name joins saint John the Baptist with persicetum, a peach orchard, the very orchard that stood here before anything else. The heart of the town is the Borgo Rotondo, a ring of houses traced back to the Lombards: it was king Liutprand who broke through the Byzantine defensive line here, around 727, and the following year he created the duchy of Persiceto. In the fifteenth century, though, the people of Persiceto rebelled against Bologna so often that Bologna's great council decided to raze the outer boroughs: the destruction only came in 1481, under Giovanni II Bentivoglio, and from then on the castle took the shape it kept almost unchanged for four centuries.

Since the sixteenth century the Partecipanza agraria has survived, the common lands redivided every nine years among the descendants of the old families. In the nineteenth century the workshops of the nail-makers grew into factories turning out iron beds and furniture exported across Europe, and the town earned the nickname little Manchester of Emilia; on the seventh of January 1869 the peasants rose up against the milling tax, and in 1904 the area elected its first socialist deputy here. The postwar agrarian struggle culminated in April 1920 in the Decima massacre, when the carabinieri fired on demonstrators. Since 1874, every February, the historic Persiceto carnival has paraded Bertoldo, the cunning peasant of Giulio Cesare Croce's tales.