Ficarolo

In 1152 the Po broke its banks here, and it was not a flood like the others: it was a series of breaches that opened a new branch, which within a few years became the main course of the river and took the name of the village, Po di Ficarolo. It is a rare case of a village giving its name to the water instead of receiving it, and the consequences were immediate for everyone: the settlement of Settepolesini, which stood on the same bank, found itself on the other side of the Po without having moved a single metre. The fortress of Ficarolo controlled the river together with its twin on the opposite bank, the Stellata of Bondeno, which is still there; during the War of Salt the Venetians laid siege to it and the small garrison surrendered only after a fierce defence against far superior forces. Then the peace of Bagnolo returned the village to the duchy of Ferrara, inside that strip which was called the Transpadana Ferrarese.

Ficarolo appears for the first time in a document of 936, as «pago Figariole», in an exchange of goods between the count of Bologna and the abbot of Nonantola, and by 970 it is already recorded as a castle. For almost a thousand years it was Emilian: under the Este until 1598, then papal, then Napoleonic. It was the Congress of Vienna, in 1815, that made it Venetian — not by moving the village, but by moving the border of the Polesine onto the Po — and since then Ficarolo has been in the province of Rovigo, a border that remained so even after 1866. In the middle of the village stands the thing everyone comes to see: the bell tower of the church of Sant'Antonino, begun in 1777, sixty-nine metres tall, so far out of true that they call it the leaning tower of the Veneto — it is taller than the real one and leans less, but the view from below is the same. The church had been built in 1773 to a design by the Ferrarese Gaetano Barbieri and stayed without a facade until 1913. Outside the centre stands instead the sugar factory of the Giglioli counts, closed since the nineteen eighties: sheds in Liberty style, one of the many sweet skeletons of the Polesine.