Villa Smeraldi is a rural residence, now a museum, which rises along the Navile canal in the hamlet of San Marino in the municipality of Bentivoglio.
Since 1973 the villa has housed the Museum of peasant civilization, which documents the buildings, the tools, the daily life of those who dealt with rural agriculture nearby, from the landowner to the farmer.
Erected on the foundations of a series of buildings built in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the complex of Villa Smeraldi is known by the surname of its most recent owners.
The villa, once known as a casino or rural palace, dates back to 1783, when it belonged to the Zambeccari Counts.
In the following century the buildings were enlarged, a neo-Gothic tower was added and some English gardens were built to surround the villa.
At the end of the 19th century, Count Gaetano Zucchini and his son Antonio expanded the property. From 1922 to 1942 it was owned by Rigoberto Smeraldi, who devoted himself to agriculture and bred thoroughbred horses. The property was inherited by Antonio Roversi.
The province of Bologna acquired the site in 1970 to create the museum of peasant civilization opened in 1973 and containing thousands of testimonies of work and life in the Bolognese countryside between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.