page_title: Ferrara
section_title: Late modern and contemporary
hierarchical_section_title: Ferrara / History / Late modern and contemporary
caption_attribution_description: A map of Ferrara, c.1600.
context_page_description: Ferrara is a city and comune in Emilia-Romagna, northern Italy, capital of the Province of Ferrara. As of 2016 it had 132,009 inhabitants. It is situated 44 kilometres northeast of Bologna, on the Po di Volano, a branch channel of the main stream of the Po River, located 5 km north. The town has broad streets and numerous palaces dating from the Renaissance, when it hosted the court of the House of Este. For its beauty and cultural importance, it has been designated by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site.
context_section_description: Ferrara, a university city second only to Bologna, remained a part of the Papal States for almost 300 years, an era marked by a steady decline; in 1792 the population of the town was only 27,000, less than in the 17th century. In 1805–1814 it was briefly part of the Napoleonic Kingdom of Italy, a client-state of the French Empire. After the 1815 Congress of Vienna, Ferrara was given back to the Pope, now guaranteed by the Empire of Austria. A bastion fort was erected in the 1600s by Pope Paul V on the site the Castel Tedaldo, an old castle at the south-west angle of the town, this was occupied by an Austrian garrison from 1832 until 1859. The fortress was completely dismantled following the birth of the Kingdom of Italy and the bricks were used for new constructions throughout over town.
  During the last decades of the 1800s and the early 1900s, Ferrara remained a modest trade centre for its large rural hinterland that relied on commercial crops such as sugar beet and industrial hemp. Large land reclamation works were carried out for decades with the aim to expand the available arable land and eradicate malaria from the wetlands along the Po delta. Mass industrialisation came to Ferrara only at the end of the 1930s with the set-up of a chemical plant by the Fascist regime that should have supplied the regime with synthetic rubber. During the Second World War Ferrara was repeatedly bombed by Allied warplanes that targeted and destroyed railway links and industrial facilities. After the war, the industrial area in Pontelagoscuro was expanded to become a giant petrochemical compound operated by Montecatini and other companies, that at its peak employed 7,000 workers and produced 20% of plastics in Italy. In recent decades, as part of a general trend in Italy and Europe, Ferrara has come to rely more on tertiary and tourism, while the heavy industry, still present in the town, has been largely phased out.
  After almost 450 years, another earthquake struck Ferrara in May 2012 causing only limited damage to the historic buildings of the town and no victims.
caption: Ferrara as it appeared in 1600
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