Castellarano

Castellarano has 14,838 inhabitants on the left bank of the Secchia, at the foot of the Reggio Apennines. The name comes from the Lombards: the place was called Castrum Gabellus, the castle on the Gabellus, which was the old name of the Secchia, and they renamed it Castrum Ariani, the castle of the Arian. At the entrance to the old village stands the rocchetta, surrounded on three sides by its ditch, which owes its present shape to Filippo Strozzi, enfeoffed here by duke Borso d'Este around 1470; beside it, joined by a covered passage, stands a tower of the tenth century, probably Lombard as well.

The oldest thing in the comune, though, is three and a half million years old. In 1997, in the badlands of the Rio della Rocca, the fossil skeleton of a whale came to light: they called her Valentina, after the hamlet of San Valentino. What survives are the two long bones of the jaw, the cervical vertebrae, part of the ribcage and one limb; it was the vertebrae, fused together, that told the scientists they were dealing with a Balaena. Alive she could reach ten metres and weigh dozens of tonnes, and she swam where the badlands are now, because all this was the bottom of the Po Gulf.