Giacciano con Baruchella

On the arms of this comune there are two beasts that do not usually stand together: the winged lion of Saint Mark, with the open book, and the she-wolf of Rome crouching to suckle the twins, divided by an embattled bar. It is the portrait of a border that ran right through here. After almost a century of disputes begun with the peace of Bagnolo, in 1569 a papal intervention brought Ferrara and Venice to terms: Baruchella went to the Serenissima, while Giacciano and Zelo stayed with the duke of Ferrara and from 1598 passed to the Papal State. The three villages came back together, by free choice, only on the first of January 1859. The names, too, tell something: Giacciano comes from ice, because in winter the frozen river was crossed on rough sledges; Baruchella from the family of the Cisamini della Fratta, called Baruchello, though it is not clear whether the family gave its name to the village or the other way round.

Here the water has always given the orders. The territory is pure plain, and the canals that cross it partly take up the beds of two old breaches of the Adige, that of the Malopera and that of the Castagnaro. It was after the great breach of 1438 that the Camaldolese monastery of the Vangadizza pushed the first reclamations, granting large plots to noble families under perpetual lease: the Cisamini were invested in 1471 and put up the first little church. Later came the Bentivoglio d'Aragona, who reclaimed more land, built the parish church of Giacciano and, in the eighteenth century, a great rural complex with a wall all around it, kept as a hunting reserve; in the church there is a tablet with the relief called the Dolente, made from a sketch by Antonio Canova. Then came the Adige breach of 1882, which flooded Zelo and sent many people away, and in 1945 a bombing destroyed the church of Sant'Andrea: only the bell tower was saved.