Lugo

Ferrari's prancing horse was born at Lugo: it was the personal emblem of Francesco Baracca, the ace of aces of Italian aviation, born here in 1888 and able to bring down thirty-four enemy aircraft; it was his mother who gave it to Enzo Ferrari to bring him luck, and the monument and the museum tell the pilot's story. But the monument the people of Lugo really love is the Pavaglione, and its name comes from silkworms: a pavaglione was the enclosure, often roofed, where the cocoons were sold. It was born in 1570, when duke Alfonso II d'Este ordered the fortifications around the rocca dismantled to make room for the weekly market: it was meant to shelter the militia and the merchants, and then trade won out over the soldiers.

The finest thing about the Pavaglione, though, is how its toll was spent. Every year the town council decided who should have it: the rebuilding of a church, a thank-offering after the plague, the founding of the Collegio Trisi, and once half of it to the young students of Lugo, who had asked for it to buy their law textbooks; and to girls who wanted to become nuns and had no dowry; and once to repave the main square. In the church of the Carmine there are two baroque organs still in working order, and on one of them the young Rossini used to practise — the town's theatre bears his name. Under the Este, Lugo was also a town of Jewish merchants: of the ghetto there remain the memory and the cemeteries, and the newer one, opened in the nineteenth century in via di Giù, can still be visited. The Este fortress, today the town hall, closes the square; and the piadina, here, is argued over with theological seriousness.