Gualtieri

Gualtieri has a Renaissance square that is a perfect square, a hundred metres by a hundred, with porticoes on three sides: it was designed by Giovan Battista Aleotti, the Ferrarese architect the Bentivoglio brought with them. This land had been given to them as a reward for draining the lowlands, and the reclamation they carried through between the fifteen and the sixteen hundreds is reckoned the most important in the lower Po plain before the eighteen hundreds. On the square stands their palace, and it is a quarter of what it was: the other three wings were taken apart over the centuries, brick by brick, to strengthen the village's flood defences. Inside the wing that is left there are the seventeenth-century frescoes of the hall of the Giants.

The water came back all the same. In the flood of 1951 it rose in Piazza Bentivoglio to the keystones of the arcades: three metres eighty. And near the embankment there is a piece of land called the Island of the Internees, because in 1945, as soon as the war was over, the comune set it aside to give work to the prisoners of war and to those coming back from the concentration camps; the river has since changed shape, and it is an island no longer. Two men from here left the village their things: Antonio Ligabue, the painter, who was born in Zurich and lived and died at Gualtieri, has a museum inside the palace; and Umberto Tirelli, who made costumes for the theatre, left some fifty paintings given him by his artist friends — Balthus, De Chirico, Casorati, Guttuso, Manzù.