Bergantino

They call it the village of the merry-go-round, and it is not a figure of speech: funfair rides are designed and built here, and the local firms work for the Italian market and for export, to the point of making Italy one of the largest producers in the world. Alongside the fields, the economy of Bergantino is that of travelling entertainment. Since 1999, inside the eighteenth-century Palazzo Strozzi on the south side of the square, there has been the Museum of the Merry-go-round and of Popular Entertainment, the only one of its kind in Italy: it tells the whole spinning world, from origins tied to village fairs to today's amusement parks. Palazzo Strozzi, for that matter, began as a hunting lodge and became a palace by dint of enlargements: it too changed trade.

Two versions circulate about the name. The legend, handed down for centuries, speaks of a pirate brigantine that sailed the Po and which, running aground right here, is said to have given rise to the community and to its name. The more probable explanation is less picturesque and more believable: the river was a thoroughfare, and people who lived off that thoroughfare took to banditry — brigands, precisely. Then there is a record worth telling in full, because on its own it says everything about the lower plain: with its fifteen metres above sea level, Bergantino is the highest comune in the province of Rovigo. On the square stands Palazzo Diani, which people here also call the Castle: the central turret was raised in the fifteenth century by Giovanni Romei, named count of Bergantino by Pope Pius II, on the rubble of the small fort the Venetians had destroyed in 1482 during the War of Salt. The moat around the building lasted for centuries more: it was Carlo Diani, in 1841, who had the drawbridge removed and the ditch filled in.