Bomporto

The name says what this place used to be: Buon Porto, the good port. Here the Naviglio canal, coming down from Modena, flows into the Panaro, at the point where the Secchia and the Panaro come closest to each other. The eighteenth-century river port, with the lock the Este duchy had built so that boats could reach the Adriatic, is the main monument of the comune and appears in its coat of arms; on the bridge are the mitre gates, the type of lock gate designed by Leonardo, which regulate the water of the Panaro into the Naviglio.

The marshland had been drained by the Benedictine monks of the abbey of Nonantola, between the ninth and the tenth century. In the eleventh the territory was part of Matilda of Canossa's fief, and on the second of July 1084 it was at Sorbara that Matilda defeated the bishops of Parma and Reggio, allies of Henry IV in the investiture struggle; the Romanesque parish church of Sorbara is the only building left from that time. Under the Este the village was a fief of the Rangoni, and the plebiscite of 1859 took it into the Kingdom. The water that made Bomporto, however, has never stopped coming back: the flood of the fourth of November 1966 struck the strip between Villavara and the centre, the earthquakes of 2012 cracked the older houses, and in January 2014 the Secchia flooded the town again.