Corbola

The name of Corbola is a unit of measurement. It comes from còrbula, that is the corba, the basket: and the corba was at once the measure of grain and the measure of the land needed to sow one of them — a village named after the amount of field required for a basket of wheat. The place was born inside the lagoon that the Po filled with earth, in the Island of Ariano, among the branches of the Po di Goro, the Po di Venezia and the Po di Gnocca. The name appears for the first time in 1054, as a possession of the Este; then, in the twelfth century, the old settlement, which lay further north, was destroyed by the breaches of the Po — those bursts of the banks that in this area have remade the geography several times — and the village rose again only in the fourteenth century at the will of Nicolò III d'Este.

From then on Corbola was a piece of frontier. It shared the history of Adria until 1482, when Adria passed to Venice and Corbola remained with the Este, who in 1519 granted it statutes of its own. On a map of 1693 one reads Corbola Ferrarese on the right of the Po di Venezia and, on the opposite bank, Corbola Veneziana, today called Bellombra: the same name divided between two states by the river. The river, for that matter, took the village's name too, since a map of 1739 calls the present Po di Venezia «Po di Corbola». The boundary of the Island of Ariano was fixed by treaty between the pope and the doge in 1749 and marked in 1751 with great pillars of terracotta tiles, partly still visible in the street that is called for this reason via Pilastri. The village also had a stop on the railway to Ariano, which ended in 1944 when the bridge over the Po was bombed.