Trecenta

Around Trecenta there are the gorghi: round pools born in hollows of the ground, the trace left by ancient floods. There are eight of them and they all have names — Bianco, Bottazza, Gàspera, Magon, Zùcolo, Màgherino, Malopera and the gorgo della Sposa, which is the largest in the whole country of Rovigo and Ferrara and is divided into two basins. There was a ninth, the gorgo dell'Osteria, near palazzo Pepoli: it was filled in in 1930. The water that dug them has never stopped coming back, and each time it has taken somebody away: after the Adige flood of 1882 the emigration to South America began, and after the Po flood of 1951 the inhabitants dropped little by little below three thousand.

In 1878 the town council called in a doctor from Recanati, Nicola Badaloni, who worked hard for the day labourers, above all after the flood of 1882; with Gino Piva he was the father of socialism in the Rovigo country. The first strike, that of 1894, stayed memorable in the Polesine and ended up in a popular song: «Evviva Gino Piva / che col suo bel parlare / tutta la provincia / ha fatto ribellare» — long live Gino Piva, who with his fine speaking made the whole province rebel. In 1948, during another strike, the labourer Evelino Tosarello was killed by the carabinieri and two other demonstrators gravely wounded. Villa Trebbi, which today is the town hall, was where the local Carboneria met after the Congress of Vienna. And in the town there is a monument to Luigi Masetti, a pioneer of cycle touring, who at the end of the nineteenth century, on one of the first modern bicycles, got as far as the United States, where he was received by the president, and north as far as the Arctic Circle.