La Diamantina, located in the countryside around Vigarano Mainarda, takes its name from the diamond, emblem of the Este family. Riccardo Bacchelli, in his novel Il mulino del Po, describes the Diamantina as “a name like one of those that sparkle in the ottave of Boiardo and Ariosto, as if it had fallen from one of them to jewel a deserted woodland and wretched, noxious lands”, underlining the original nature of the place, once wooded and of poor fertility.
This estate, in the so-called Polesine di Casaglia, was in the Middle Ages owned by the men of Sette Polesine and was purchased in 1506 by Duke Ercole I d’Este. At the centre of the settlement there was already, in the fifteenth century, a tower, to which in the following century a palace was added, documented from the mid-sixteenth century onwards. The Este family promoted hydraulic improvement works by digging a straight channel known as the scolo cittadino (“city drain”) and encouraging new rural settlements to foster agriculture.
After being for a time the property of Lucrezia Borgia, the estate passed in 1537 to Ercole II d’Este, remaining under Este control until the mid-eighteenth century. It was then sold to Marshal Gianluca Pallavicini, who restored both the buildings and the agricultural production structures. In 1870 it became the property of Senator Silvestro Camerini, who resumed the reclamation works.
Today the Diamantina is privately owned and can be visited on the occasion of temporary events. It also houses a collection of agricultural machinery and equipment. Its value lies above all in the preservation of a rural estate which originally extended over about 1,600 hectares.
The complex retains the characteristic layout of the lower Po Plain: a main nucleus, administrative centre of the estate, flanked by small hamlets and farmhouses scattered across the surrounding land. The hydraulic works that made agricultural use of the soil possible remain an integral part of the landscape, dominated by the straight alignment of the Canal Bianco, already shown on a map dating from the early sixteenth century.
For its historical and landscape significance, the Diamantina is now recognised in the Catalogo Nazionale dei Paesaggi Rurali Storici (Italy’s National Catalogue of Historical Rural Landscapes).
Private property – no public access