According to what Gerolamo Melchiorri has transmitted to us through his study of place names in Ferrara (first published in 1918), the name of this urban avenue is connected to the ‘old place, called ‘Zudeca dei Torresini’ that stood in the Borgo Inferiore neighbourhood, near the main ditch of the city, which was covered and converted to a wide avenue, called a ‘Corso’. It was historically called that of the Giuvecca, Giudecca, Zuecca and Zodeca’, finally given the name ‘Giovecca’( 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. 80) In his opinion, the most probable derivation is that from the Provençal Juvec, meaning Gioco (game): the reference seems to be to the games and races that were historically held to celebrate the feast day of San Giorgio, patron saint of Ferrara. These events were once held in two locations not far from Corso Giovecca, later moved to other streets throughout the city. Mentioning Melchiorri's theory is important given the fortune and importance that his study has had and continues to have for Ferrara.

However, it is equally important to highlight that a recent study by Carla Maria Sanfilippo revealed that the name of this road actually refers to the tanning of leather, an age-old activity in Ferrara. Sanfilippo highlights how ‘the name zoeca, in the oldest documents available, never refer to a road, but to a larger area’ [Fra Lingua e Storia: Note di Toponomastica Ferrarese, Online Annals of Ferrara - Literature, Vol. 1 (2012) 29/37], as confirmed by ‘recent archaeological digs that have shown how the current Via Giovecca coincides with “the northern edge of the old ditch-canal” and that the latter is partially filled in :”'between the last quarter of the fifteenth century and the half or three-quarters of the following century” and definitively filled in “no sooner than the early 1500s, along with the construction of new buildings on the footprint of the demolished old walls” [S. Gelichi, Corso della Giovecca, in A.M. Visser (edited by), Ferrara nel Medioevo. Topografia Storica e Archeologia Urbana, Grafis Edizioni, Casalecchio di Reno, Italy 1995, p. 150]. ...One of the cornerstones of local historiography - the belief that Corso Giovecca was already urbanised in the fourteenth century and inhabited by Jews - thus begins to falter. To the contrary, since it first appeared, the Jewish community was solidly rooted in the heart of the city, not outside it, seeing as it was increasingly looked upon favourably by the House of Este and there were no coercive measures that confined Jews to a suburban or rural area’ (C.M. Sanfilippo). Sanfilippo references the equation in which Judaica = urban settlement and the scholar continues, starting from the name places, to reinterpret the city’s history: ‘It is therefore likely that the term giudecca did not merely allude to the residence of a group of Jews, but also to the place where they worked as tanners, with the term eventually taking on the meaning of tannery, regardless of who was carrying out the operation’ (ibid.).

In the past, Corso Giovecca was ‘a canal, a ditch to protect the walls, with the castle known as San Michele or Castelvecchio as its focal point’ (C. Bassi, Perché Ferrara è Bella). As the buildings on its left side are subsequent to the ‘Third Addition’ or the ‘Erculean Addition’, and with the monumental structure on the right side prevailing, we can consider the Giovecca the ‘limit of the old town and, on the other side, the edge of the new city under construction as of 1490. With this duplicity in its function as a margin, Corso Giovecca became the heart of the two cities that it unites’ (C. Bassi).

Heading down Corso Giovecca from the intersection with Corso Martiri della Libertà, Borgo dei Leoni and Largo Castello near Viale Cavour, many notable buildings stand out, starting with the façade of the Church of San Carlo, in the first block on the left. It faces one of the entrances to Rotonda Foschini, which is part of the Municipal Theatre: both are elliptical in shape and placed perfectly on the same axis.

Continuing on, on the left is the access point to the twentieth-century quarter. Though small in size, it is quite valuable in terms of urban planning and architecture, designed by architect Carlo Savonuzzi.

On the same side, at no. 65, is the sixteenth-century building of Palazzo Magrini. In the 1970s, it was restored by Carlo Bassi and Goffredo Boschetti on behalf of Banca di Credito Agrario, which turned it into its head offices. It later became the operational offices of another bank, Cassa di Risparmio di Ferrara, and is now that of BPER Banca.

On the right, at no. 108, is the imposing building that was once the headquarters of Cassa di Risparmio di Ferrara, now used by BPER Banca, designed by Luigi Barbantini with Gaetano Koch as a consultant, built in 1907.

110 Corso Giovecca is the headquarters of the Arma dei Carabinieri, in the sixteenth-century Palazzo Romei Agnoletti. Ferrara’s Fascist base in the 1930s, it was restored in 2004, regaining its aesthetic and architectural qualities and its use as a government structure.

At no. 135, passers-by can admire the plaque placed by the Dante Alighieri Society in memory of Ferruccio Luppis, or De Lupis, who helped cultivate the image of Ferrara around the world.

148 Corso Giovecca is the entrance to Parco Pareschi, a public park that was once an Este garden, which then became a green space attached to Palazzo di Renata di Francia and purchased in the nineteenth century along with the building behind it by the Pareschi family, turning it into an English garden. It still bears the name of the family today, despite the fact that it was later purchased by the Cini family that, represented by Vittorio Cini, left the gardens to the city for public use.

The Pico Cavalieri Casa della Patria is found at no. 165: this building was donated to the city of Ferrara by the father of Cavalieri, a pilot who was killed at Arona during WWI and who also has a road named after him in Ferrara. The historical research association dedicated to him, and voluntary associations, hold their meetings in the structure.

170 Corso Giovecca is the address of Palazzina Marfisa d’Este, one of the hubs of the city's museum network, behind which is the tennis club where Giorgio Bassani and Michelangelo Antonioni often played.

Street no. 203 is the entrance to the former Sant’Anna Hospital, designed by Giacomo Diegoli in 1927 and now the San Rocco Healthcare Clinic. The last large, important building on Corso Giovecca before it ends, the clinic is accented by the Prospettiva del Mazzarelli triumphal arch (built in 1703), that faces Piazza Medaglie d’Oro and by the stretch of city walls that opens the city to the east, towards the sea, following along Via Pomposa.

Corso Giovecca appears in many of Bassani's works.

Among the occurrences that stand out is the beginning of the second of the Five Stories of Ferrara, ‘The Stroll Before Dinner’. As if in a long, silent sequence shot that uses visual data to introject the reader gradually yet increasingly in depth, in the story and narration, and the road becomes the undisputed protagonist of the scene. The pretext is the looking at of the image seen on a vintage postcard that portrays Corso Giovecca. This literary device makes it possible to go from the visual, exclusively objective description of the event, a visual description that despite the static nature of the source is portrayed as if in movement, like that of an eye as it traces the details of the photograph, analogous to that of a passer-by walking down the street or a camera in a sequence shot, and that backdrop, through the author's gaze, gradually takes on three-dimensionality and life. (The first part of the story, dedicated to this important avenue, is found in the quotes section.) A similar process to that implemented by Bassani (allowing the reader to travel down Corso Giovecca using his gaze) can be found in one of the author's poems, Rolls Royce, in which Bassani writes in first person and where the visual description leads to memories and autobiography, even in the literary and nostalgic transformation.

Bassani also can be credited with a description of Corso Giovecca immediately after WWI. Relatively long and detailed, it makes up the very beginning of ‘The Stroll Before Dinner’, the 1945 story first published posthumously in Bassani. Racconti, Diari, Cronache (1935-1956) (Feltrinelli, Milan 2014, p. 341s.). The book's editor also recognises the description as ‘indeed, the first detailed testimony of the Stroll of Five Stories of Ferrara, but it also a composition that can stand on its own’ (ibid., p. 341), valuable also for the author's signature expression of memory.

Even today, rummaging through some small second-hand stores in Ferrara, it’s not unlikely that you could turn up postcards almost a hundred years old.  They show views that are yellowed, stained, sometimes, to tell the truth, barely decipherable … One of the many shows Corso Giovecca, the main city thoroughfare, as it was then, in the second half of the nineteenth century. To the right and in shadow, in the wings, looms the buttress of the City Theatre, while the light, typical of a golden springtime dusk of the Emilia Romagna, congregates entirely on the left-hand side of the image. There the houses are low, having for the most part only a single floor, with their roofs covered with thick russet tiles, and below them some little shops, a grocer’s store, the entrance to a coal merchant’s, a horsemeat butcher and so on: all of which were razed to the ground when, in 1930, the eighth year of the Fascist Era, almost opposite the City Theatre, the decision was made to build the enormous structure of the General Insurance in white Roman travertine.

The postcard has been adapted from a photograph. As such it reveals, and not inaccurately, the look of the Giovecca around the turn of the twentieth century – a kind of wide carriageway amid the rather shapeless surroundings, with its rough cobbles, more fitting for a large village of Lower Romagna than of a provincial capital, divided in the middle by the fine parallel lines of the tram rails – but it also reveals just as clearly how life was going on along the entire street in that moment when the photographer pressed the button. The street thus captured extends from the corner of the City Theatre and the Gran Caffè Zampori beneath it, to the right, a few yards away from where the tripod had been set up, as far down there as the distant, pink sunlit facade of the Prospettiva arch at the very end.’

(G. Bassani, ‘The Stroll Before Dinner’, translated by Jamie McKendrick in The Novel of Ferrara, Penguin Classics, 2018, e-book location 728-733)

‘I have to think hard to remember Corso G. as it was then, just after the '14-’18 war. The current paving is something luxurious, the stuff of large cities. As it is now, Corso G. is a long, wide, very straight avenue that’s clean enough to reflect the colour of the sky. They got rid of the streetcar rails, and even the parallel tracks in white stone along which carriages and bicycles ran. …

In the years immediately following the First World War, I was a little boy, and if I think of Corso G as it was then, now it appears to me like a faded photograph. There were no smooth light blue paving stones, there were no suspended cables of the trolleybus. I remember the winding line of the tracks, increasingly rusted as you gradually approached the countryside, I remember the parallel tracks in dirty grey, upon which bicycles and buggies travelled, hopping at every seam between the stones. It was a road all scattered with stones and uneven underfoot as a carriage track: so, in my memory, it seems more crowded than today, livelier. But on the other hand, I know that can’t be true.’

[G. Bassani, ‘La Passeggiata Prima di Cena’, in Bassani. Racconti, Diari, Cronache (1935-1956), edited by P. Pieri, Feltrinelli, Milan 2014, p. 342s.]