San Pietro in Casale

In the fields of Maccaretolo, at a place called Tombe, a Roman village lies buried that stood along the old course of the Reno and that, besides farming, made arrows for the legions. When the river changed its bed the village lost its importance and the forges moved to a colony further north, Ferraia: Ferrara. The name of the comune, by contrast, is late, and appears in 1223, in an ordinance by which Bologna imposed on the villages of its countryside a quarter-head from the city, for military purposes.

Until the eighteenth century San Pietro was little more than a church with a few houses around it, with a weekly market authorised by the Bolognese senate in 1544 and two fires marking its chronicles: in 1637 at the hands of anti-papal troops, in 1809 at those of brigands. The damp land was later turned over to rice, a crop that has now disappeared completely. On the seventeenth of September 1944, at the end of a public demonstration in front of the town hall, five partisans were seized and shot in the Valle delle Tombe: Idalgo Cantelli, Dino Mazzuchelli, Omar Nanni, Giuseppe Setti and Gianfranco Versura.