Castelmassa

The name records a halt: Massa comes from the Latin mansio, and the village grew where the via Hatriense crossed the via Altinate. For centuries it was called Massa Superiore, because at twelve metres above sea level it was the highest point in the Polesine; earlier still it was Santa Maria in Basilica, the name it carries in the donation of 938 to the Church of Adria. The name has changed repeatedly according to whether the comune was joined to or split from neighbouring Castelnovo Bariano: the present one comes from a royal decree of 1928 that suppressed both and merged them.

Although it lies in the Veneto, the dialect spoken here is an Emilian one, very close to that of Ferrara, the speech of the Ferrarese Transpadana: it is the legacy of the centuries when the land belonged to Ferrara, to whose bishopric Matilda of Canossa gave it in 1101. On the square stands the palace of the Bentivoglio, nobles from Bologna. In the second half of the twentieth century the young left the fields for the factories, and some surnames disappeared from the village along with them: the Valerin and the Rizzi.