On the cultural pages of the Corriere Padano, directed by Quilici, wrote Ferrara personalities who later distanced themselves from Fascism; among them were Giorgio Bassani, Michelangelo Antonioni and Lanfranco Caretti.

[9] With Balbo and Panunzio he founded a revolutionary action group in the city,[10] and became part, in 1922,[11] of a small circle of the party official's close associates, was a candidate in the local administrative elections at the end of that same year, in a climate of strong political contrast and violence,[12] and became an alderman.

Renzo Ravenna was appointed Podestà of Ferrara on December 16, 1926, by royal decree and received a telegram of congratulatory good wishes from his friend Italo Balbo,[17] who had personally committed himself to this result.

He thus began his activity as the city's first administrator and, in that role, demonstrated that he possessed, in addition to personal honesty, the skills required by the important function,[18] in full compliance with Fascist directives.

[21] Loans of up to 20 years were activated with public credit institutions, and part of the funds came directly from the government, both by Balbo's precise intervention and by general political choice at the national level.

Starting in the second half of the 1930s, Ravenna and Balbo thought about the creation of an industrial hub for the city, and this was in a further attempt to find an employment outlet that not even the major reclamation works had offered, despite expectations.

"[23] For Antonella Guarneri (head of the city's Museum of the Risorgimento and Resistance), the urban development implemented by Fascism in Ferrara was inadequate to Biagio Rossetti's pre-existing design of the Addizione Erculea, with the building of "heavy monuments" and "bourgeois neighborhoods" with little respect for the already existing ones.

Balbo intended, by promoting this policy, to make people forget the squadrist violence of the early 1920s,[25][26] and to give the city a different and more acceptable image of the party and its figure.

In contrast to the central government's choices, the City of Ferrara focused on local tradition, the revaluation of Este history and events and exhibitions that renewed its ancient splendor.

Italo Balbo obtained from these cultural initiatives the personal recognition he sought, and Renzo Ravenna materialized his love for Ferrara, forging relationships often of true friendship with many city artists, such as, for example: Arrigo Minerbi,[32] Giovanni Boldini, Filippo de Pisis, Achille Funi, Giuseppe Mentessi, and Annibale Zucchini.

The high official, a friend of Ravenna, after the necessary investigations entrusted to the forces of law and order, sent reassurances to Rome about the correctness and consideration the podestà enjoyed in the city, recalling the esteem in which he was held by Italo Balbo as well.

Toward the end of 1935, when his second term was about to expire, in spite of new ministerial attempts to deprive him of office on account of his religion, the support of Prefect Festa and the distant protection of Balbo caused the post to be renewed, and thus came the Roman reappointment.

[38] No direct intervention by Mussolini was proven in the affair, although the rivalry that pitted the head of the government and the party official originally from Ferrara, at that time governor in Libya, was well known.

"[44] In the days immediately following, his wife Lucia recounted, Balbo inquired from his friend whether, during his years at the head of the city, he had in any way taken advantage of his position to increase his personal finances.

Quilici, for example, and Archbishop Bovelli, while continuing, privately, to send him good wishes and signs of closeness, maintained a public position of full agreement with the racial laws.

[47][48] The increasingly stringent regulations excluded Ravenna and all Jews even from the main gathering places in Ferrara, and when it came to clubs, members of the Jewish faith were simply considered to have resigned.

His practice was frequented by the wealthy Jewish bourgeoisie who were either attempting to defend their property, renouncing civil and political rights, or who wanted to take the difficult path of Aryanization, in cases of mixed marriages.

Ravenna, reached by the message, prepared to travel to Switzerland, refusing Archbishop Bovelli's offer to find him safety in the Vatican but accepting financial help from his friend Balbo's widow for the costly expatriation to Swiss soil.

[66] He collaborated with Raffaele Cantoni and Angelo Donati, prominent figures in the Jewish world in Italy, and tried in various ways to get news of his family members who had been arrested and deported.

[67][68] In 1944 he set up, together with others, a Relief Committee for Italian political and racial deportees,[69][70] and put his ability to weave human relationships and his organizational skills at the service of this initiative.

However, the president of the Cavallari Bar Association implicitly commented that for certain personalities who had held important positions for so long during the years of the regime, a sanctioning measure, albeit of lesser severity than that provided by law, would be appropriate.

[76][77] Michele Tortora, mayor of Ferrara from 1945 to 1946, harshly attacked the previous administrations (thus including Ravenna's, which lasted 12 years), claiming in a report to the city council that the effects of fascist misrule had been deleterious.

Feeling directly implicated, Ravenna addressed a letter to Tortora in which he claimed the amount of public works accomplished during his podestariate and the steady improvement of the situation compared to previous periods, as witnessed by the citizens who lived through those times.

[80] In his slow return to everyday life in Ferrara, he maintained relations with the lawyer Alberto Verdi, who had succeeded him in the town hall; with Luigi Zappelli, whom he had met in Switzerland; with Italo Balbo's widow; with Nello Quilici's family; and with Amerigo Festa, the prefect who had defended him and to whom he often wrote.

For this purpose he considered involving a historian at that time in his early thirties, Renzo De Felice, and later came in contact with Meir Michaelis, an Israeli scholar who sought him out because he was working on the reconstruction of that historical period.

"[90] He recalls that in him "political passion was never such as to overshadow love for his city or the value of friendship," notes "his strong sense of family," and makes one suspect in him "some form of naiveté" in his Fascist faith.

"[93][94] It should be added that Bassani belonged to a generation after Renzo Ravenna's, closer to that of his son Paolo to whom he was linked for a long time, for example in the protection of environmental and cultural heritage.

[96] In a volume published in 2014 that collects various works by Bassani, edited by Piero Pieri, the writer's views on the Ferrarese Jewish bourgeoisie, and in particular on Renzo Ravenna, are very well reiterated.

[99] He maintained ties of mutual esteem and true friendship for long years with Archbishop Bovelli, until his definitive return to Ferrara, with exchanges of good wishes on the occasion of holidays witnessed by letters that have come down to us.

As mentioned, Ravenna was not an early PNF member...he took membership in January 1924...he was never a squadrist.the reckless and dishonest management of power that characterized the rule of other fascist administrations in other cities did not occur in the Estense city.to finally close the case will be lawyer Renzo Ravenna, judicial administrator and receiver of the bankruptcy of the Fascist Cooperative of Production and Labor of Bondeno as well as podestà of Ferrara.After the March on Rome and the years that led to the ever-increasing consolidation of the fascist regime and the overthrow of the individual and political freedoms of the Italians, both at the national and local levels witnessed the relentless work of the hierarchies to build a new climate that would help make people forget the mourning that lay behind the destruction of democracy and the establishment of dictatorship.