In a hall of the town hall in Modena, kept behind glass and treated with the reverence usually reserved for saints’ relics, hangs an old wooden bucket. It is not a beautiful object, a plain oaken pail, the kind that once drew water from a well, and it is not even the real one anymore; the genuine article is locked away for safekeeping, and a copy swings in the tower of the Ghirlandina overhead.
Yet Modena has guarded this bucket for seven hundred years, because it was taken from Bologna, and in these parts a thing taken from Bologna is a thing worth keeping forever. The bucket is the trophy of one of the strangest wars in European history, the Guerra della Secchia Rapita, the War of the Stolen Bucket.
