Conselice

Between seven thousand and two thousand years ago this was a sea lagoon. Excavations in the nineteen-nineties turned up shells and lagoon material, including an oyster that radiocarbon dated to a little over two thousand six hundred years ago. The site lay on the edge of the Valle Padusa and, in the Roman grid, was in axis with Forum Cornelii, that is Imola: from here one reached the Po di Primaro by water, which for Imola was the most direct way to the sea. So there was a lagoon port. The name Caput Silicis appears in the parchments from the eleventh century, and one hypothesis is that the Roman road here was paved; but not a single Roman find has ever come out from under today's via Selice.

The oldest document naming the Portus de Capite selcis, of 1084, records a defeat: the bishop, who held the tolls and the lordship of the landing, had to lower the transit tariffs for Imola's ships and promise a canal linking the city to his own port. Through that port Imola traded with Venice, so much so that Venetian coin was legal tender in the city. In 1371 the Descriptio provinciae Romandiolae listed Conselice as a fortified place with thirty-four hearths. Born here were Eleuterio Felice Foresti, poet and revolutionary who ended up teaching at Columbia and as United States consul general in Genoa, and the partisan Ines Bedeschi, gold medal for military valour, killed by the Nazis.