In 1890 a serious event happened in Conselice. On May the 20th and 21st a group of rice weeders gathered in the square Piazza Maggiore and demanded more dignified work conditions and higher salaries. The protesters headed for the municipality, but security guards reacted with violence and shot at the workers; three were killed, two women rice weeders and a man.
In Conselice rice farming started during the 19th century. The first fields to be farmed with rice were the ones near marshes and wetlands, which were in the northern area of the municipality, between Lavezzola and Po di Primaro; in those days wetlands were very close to the town centres of Conselice and San Patrizio.
In 1890 a serious event happened in Conselice. On May the 20th and 21st a group of rice weeders gathered in the square Piazza Maggiore and demanded more dignified work conditions and higher salaries. They had already protested in previous occasions, especially to the rice fields owners, but had obtained no result.
On this occasion the workers tried to talk to the municipality and to the state. Several workers were in fact now short of work because a local railway line (the Ferrara-Ravenna-Rimini line), publicly funded, had been completed the previous year. The protesters headed for the municipality, but security guards reacted with violence and shot at the workers; three were killed, two women rice weeders and a man.
This event marked an historical change in the town and in the history of employment and workers’ unions in the whole Pianura Padana. After the killing of the three workers in Piazza Maggiore, local workers started to get organised into the earliest unions.
