Quistello

Quistello stands on the right bank of the Secchia, in the lower Mantuan plain, and the forty-fifth parallel skirts it to the south, the line exactly halfway between the North Pole and the Equator. The name is thought to come from the Custellum, an outflow of the old Po which ran beside the settlement and closed it off to the north; it is as Custello that the place appears in the deed by which Tedaldo di Canossa gave the territory, the castle and the church to San Benedetto in 1007, the founding charter of the Polirone monastery.

The river that now passes to the west of the town has not always been there. Around 1336, at the end of works that had lasted decades, the Secchia was brought to flow into the Po near Mirasole, and the reason is still debated: perhaps to complete the reclamation of the lands of San Benedetto Po, perhaps to drain the water around Mirandola, which the floods swamped again and again. On 15 September 1734, at the place called Gaidella, Franco-Sardinian and Austrian troops fought here in the war over the succession to the Polish throne.