Green Cento
The multicoloured countryside of the Cento area opening up on the horizon is ideal for open air activities, cycling, jogging, birdwatching, orienteering and horse-riding. The banks of the Reno are the perfect place for practicing all these sports, and there are many more spots in the Cento countryside where the landscape takes over and allows us to lose ourselves in contact with nature.
The Cento area offers numerous parks, favourite destinations for children in particular, who enjoy festivals, games, snacks, stories, shows and expeditions in search of local wildlife:
- Parco del Reno (Cento), with a children's playground and a little pond.
- Parco "I Gorghi" (Renazzo) is a 20,000 m2 nature reserve, home to a dozen native tree species. Every July a two-day rock music festival called "Woodstock" is held here (visitors can camp in the park).
- Parco di Malaffitto (Renazzo): one of a very few areas (2880 m2) where nature, habitat and the rural landscape have remained unchanged over time.
- Giardino del Gigante - Giant's Gardern (Cento): an environmental work of art featuring gigantic interactive sculptures by artist Marco Pellizzola.
- Legambiente Botanical Garden (Torrespada): created as an environ mental education project for children in nursery school and elementary school, who have planted trees in the park for 8 years in a row.
A variety of sports facilities are available for leisure and exercise. As well as numerous gyms and playing fields, Cento offers track and field, tennis courts, a football stadium, a fitness circuit, a velodro-me, a sports complex and a swimming pool. Cento is proud of its official tug-of-war ground created for the 2005 European Championships and Augusto Fava Golf Club, a regulation golf course open for competition between March and November. The flat plains of the Po valley are particularly suitable for cycling trips.
The town recently built cycle paths to form a number of different itineraries in the area: the most attractive of these winds through the fields of the Partecipanza Agraria land-sharing system.
Cycle through fields planted with wheat and maize, orchards and poplar groves, admiring the farmhouses with their wells, stables and barns as far as Renazzo, where you may visit the Museum of History and Culture of the Cento Area, opened in 2004.
Images description: The Giant's Garden, is a vast green area inhabited by a lizard and a number of extraordinary structures made ofmulticoloured ceramic mosaic.
With the recovery of the rural complex (constructed in stages beginning in the late sixteenth century) in Renazzo, in the heart of the Malaffitto, Partecipanza Agraria di Cento wished to create a place where visitors could get to know or rediscover the history and culture of the Cento area with the aid of today's technologies. The complex consists of the farmhouse used as a museum and place for tasting typical products, a barn which is now a "multifunctional hall", and a cell used for educational workshops and as a study centre. Construction of a kiln is planned. A hectare of land surrounding the complex is used to sup-port various activities carried out in the museum.
Image description: Rural complex of the Partecipanza Agraria di Cento, Museum of the History and Culture of the Cento Area (Renazzo, via Larga 43).