Roncoferraro

Roncoferraro lies in the Mantuan plain southeast of the city, between the Mincio and the Po. Its name joins the Latin runcare, to hoe, and ferarum, land rich in game. Almost the whole history of the comune happened at Governolo, the hamlet where the two rivers meet: the spot Dante names in the twentieth canto of the Inferno, where the Mincio flows into the Po.

Tradition sets the meeting of Pope Leo I and Attila at Governolo in 452, though other sites are proposed; there Giovanni delle Bande Nere took the leg wound he died of. In 1848 the old double drawbridge over the Mincio changed hands twice: in April the small Modenese army pushed back an Austrian raid from Mantua, in July the Sardinian general Eusebio Bava retook it. On the river stands the Bertazzolo lock, from the waterworks Gabriele Bertazzolo carried out there in the early seventeenth century. The arms cross two silver swords on red over a green field with a river.