The name of this street arose from the fact that, in 1360, Marquis Aldobrandino d’Este legalized duels in Ferrara, excluding those participating in the duel from prosecution, as Gerolamo Melchiorri noted, ‘as if in “a field of honour”’.

Via Campofranco was once part of Via Praisolo, and today you might pass by this small road without even noticing it, as it is just a few metres long and narrower than most. Walking down it, however, visitors will discover the Poor Clares Church of Corpus Domini and part of the convent where Saint Catherine Vegri once lived, both built in 1415.

The decoration on the façade is original, and Alfonso I, Ercole II and Alfonso II d’Este, Dukes of Ferrara, and Lucrezia Borgia and Lucrezia d’Este, the Duchesses of Ferrara and Urbino, are buried inside. The convent was almost entirely reclaimed by the state and turned into technical schools.

In his fictional description of the real city, Giorgio Bassani placed the home of one of the protagonists of A Memorial Tablet in Via Mazzini (one of the Five Stories of Ferrara that make up his Novel of Ferrara) in this street. In Bassani’s tale, an alienated, dehumanised Geo Josz has returned home, a survivor of the Holocaust and its concentration camps. The character was loosely based on Eugenio (Genio) Ravenna, the author's second cousin: Eugenio's grandmother, Amelia Hanau, was the sister of Bassani's paternal grandmother, Eugenia. To this day, her portrait (by Bergonzoni) hangs in the headquarters of the Giorgio Bassani Foundation. A survivor of the Holocaust like Geo Josz, Eugenio also found someone by his same name among those mentioned on the 1949 plaque in Via Mazzini affixed in memory of the Jews of Ferrara who didn’t return from the extermination camps.

The proximity of the houses of three protagonists in three of the Five Stories of Ferrara is notable. They in fact live next to Via Campofranco, in Via Salinguerra (the road where Lida Mantovani lives in her eponymous tale), and Via Fondobanchetto (where the anti-Fascist teacher is kept while under house arrest by her Fascist sister and brother-in-law in ‘Clelia Trotti's Last Days’).

In the immediate vicinity of that which, before the war, had been the Josz house...there were to be seen, naturally, a good number of beards.  And this contributed not a little in giving to the low building of exposed red brickwork, topped by a slender Ghibelline tower and extensive enough to cover almost the entire length of the secluded Via Campofranco, a grim, military air, fitting perhaps to recall the old owners of the establishment, the marqueses Del Sale, from whom Angelo Josz had bought it in 1910 for a few thousand lire, but it didn’t in the slightest remind one of him, the Jewish wholesale-cloth dealer who ended up in Germany with his wife and children.

The big street entrance door was wide open. In front of it, seated on the steps, with machine-guns between their bare legs or lounging on the seats of a jeep parked by the high wall opposite which encircled a huge, burgeoning garden, a dozen partisans were lazing about. But there were others, in greater numbers, some with voluminous files under their arms and all with energetic, determined faces, who kept coming and going. Between the street, half in shadow, half in sunlight, and the wide-open entrance of the old baronial house, in short, there was an intense, vivid, even joyful bustle, fully in keeping with the shrieks of the swallows that swooped down, almost grazing the cobblestones, and with the clacking of typewriters that issued ceaselessly from the barred ground-floor windows.’

(G. Bassani, ‘A Memorial Tablet in Via Mazzini’ in The Novel of Ferrara, Translated by Jamie McKendrick, Penguin Classics 2018, e-book location 1191-1200)

‘During the wait for the Via Campofranco establishment to return effectively and entirely into his possession, Geo Josz seemed happy to occupy a single room...

More than a room, in effect it was a kind of granary built at the top of the crenellated tower that overshadowed the house: a big, bare room into which, after having climbed not less than a hundred steps that ended in a rickety, little wooden staircase, one entered directly into a space once used as a lumber-room. ...From that height, however, through a wide window, it was soon apparent that Geo Josz could follow everything that happened not only in the garden, but also in Via Campofranco.

And since he hardly ever left the house, presumably spending hour after hour looking at the vast panorama of russet tiles, vegetable gardens and the distant countryside which extended beneath his feet, his continual presence became for the occupants of the floors beneath, to put it mildly, annoying and irksome.’

(G. Bassani, ‘A Memorial Tablet in Via Mazzini’ in The Novel of Ferrara, Translated by Jamie McKendrick, Penguin Classics 2018, e-book location 1235-1238)

‘A street that once was part of Via Praisolo. The name Via Campofranco derived from the concession granted by the Marquis Aldobrandino d’Este in 1360 to allow duels in Ferrara, like a ‘field of honour’ without punishment. This ‘open field’ was granted to duellers in Via del Praisolo and Via del Pergolato. The terrible custom of having duels among us goes back at least to 1015, and it was considered lawful even among those of the church. In Via Cortevecchia there was an alley called “Alley of Duels”...’

(G. Melchiorri, Nomenclatura ed Etimologia delle Piazze e delle Strade di Ferrara e Ampliamenti all’Opera di Gerolamo Melchiorri, edited by C. Bassi, 2G Editrice, Ferrara 2009, p. 40)

On the similarities between Geo Josz and Eugenio (Genio) Ravenna, the daughter of the latter, Marcella Hannà Ravenna, provides some insight: ‘To create Geo Josz, the protagonist of A Memorial Tablet in Via Mazzini’, Giorgio Bassani was inspired by a real person, Eugenio (Gegio) Ravenna, my father. It is a question that as yet has never been addressed by studies on the topic. When the story was published, I was too little and thus unable to understand or remember what his reaction was. He didn’t talk to us about it afterwards, just as he usually did for all matters that related to him.

[…] What Geo and the real Eugenio (Gegio) Ravenna, Bassani's second cousin, share first and foremost is that they both read the plaque in Via Mazzini and, just as Geo found his own name, so did Gegio. Then, aside from the assonance of the names, they share only a few other similarities, such as the colour of their eyes and perhaps that sometimes contemptuous look on their face.’

M. Hannà Ravenna, “Una Lapide in via Mazzini”: la Vera Storia di Geo Josz, storiamestre, 17 March 2018