Codigoro

Codigoro has 12,389 inhabitants in the Po delta, and is one of only three coastal comuni of historic Emilia. The name is a piece of river geography: it comes from Caput Gauri, the head of the Gaurus, that is of the Po di Goro, at the point where the river forked; a few kilometres away Medium gauri became Mezzogoro. Here, on what was then an islet between the Po di Volano and the Po di Goro, Benedictine monks settled and built the abbey of Pomposa, one of the most important religious monuments of northern Italy. Then, in 1152, came the Rotta di Ficarolo: the Po shifted its course northwards, the Volano dried up, and the monks left. Pomposa and Codigoro were abandoned by the people who had made them.

Everything that came afterwards is an argument with the water. The Este began reclaiming in 1464 and took more than a century over it; then, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, Venice moved the outlet of the Po di Levante further south, into Ferrarese territory, and the Este hydraulic works were made useless at a stroke. Reclamation began again under the Papal State and went on into the nineteenth century, with the first pumping stations. On the coast, the Torre della Finanza, built to watch the traffic on the Volano, was destroyed outright by a storm surge in 1729 because the shore beneath it had eroded, and had to be rebuilt. In 1899 the landowners' company of Codigoro was among the founders of Eridania, and the first industrial sugar refinery opened here; and it was at Codigoro that Giorgio Bassani, after whom the town library is named, set much of his novel L'airone.