Cento gave the world Guercino: Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, born here in 1591, filled churches and the town gallery with canvases that make the city a small sanctuary of Emilian Baroque. The fourteenth-century fortress and the arcaded main street complete the portrait of a lowland capital between Ferrara and Bologna, wounded by the 2012 earthquake and patient in its restorations.
The other face is Carnival: twinned with Rio de Janeiro's, it parades allegorical floats and masks — Tasi first among them — in a samba-Emilian pairing unique in Europe. Salama da sugo and old masters: opposites live very well together here.
Near Cento
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
