The name says what the place was. Poggio comes from the Latin podium, the low mounds that rose out of the water, and Renatico from reuna, the equivalent of motta, a rise ringed by marsh: the village is called, literally, the dry hump in the middle of the swamp. The easy explanation, the one that brings in the river Reno flowing a few kilometres away, does not hold: the Reno was diverted into its present bed only under pope Benedict XIV. Who happened to be Prospero Lorenzo Lambertini, of the family that held this very fief, and who in 1834 still gave the municipality its name, then Poggio Lambertini.
Of the Lambertini castle, by then the town hall, the earthquake of 2012 brought down the clock tower; the bell tower of the church of San Michele was left standing but unsafe, and on the fourth of June that year it was demolished with a hundred and twenty timed micro-charges, calculated so that it would not fall onto the church below. The village that built itself above the water now looks upward instead: the plain houses the Aerospace Operations Command of the Italian Air Force, together with a NATO command and control centre.
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📅 Every year, on 29 September
On 29 September Poggio Renatico celebrates Saint Michael the Archangel in the abbey church dedicated to him; the village also preserves the Castello Lambertini.
Flour, lard, oil and sourdough starter, a soft knot at the centre and four thin horns: coppia ferrarese has held Protected Geographical Indication status since 2001.
Read more →Straight-line distances from the town centre. Tap a point to open its page.
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
Outside Poggio Renatico, but an easy day trip away.
