A Bucket the Only Prize
The battle in which "a bucket was the only prize" was fought at Bologna in 1325. The people of Modena had made a raid upon that city and had carried off, as a trophy of victory, the bucket belonging to the public well. The expedition of the Bolognese to recover this bucket forms the basis of the twelve mock heroic cantos of Tassoni. Alessandro Tassoni (1566-1635) having been an inhabitant of Modena, the poem contains many personal and local allusions that are now obscure; yet a biographer of Tassoni remarks that the work "cannot be neglected by any systematic student of Italian literature." Tassoni wrote many other works, but his fame rests upon this comic epic, "The Rape of the Bucket" ("La Secchia Rapita"); it is after the style of Butler's "Hudibras," and is intended as a burlesque on the petty wars which were so common between Italian cities in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.
Than this same bucket conquered from the foe,
Caused it in form of trophy to advance
Before the troops, sublime upon a lance:
To think how he in open day had scoured
Bolonia, and their virgin-spring deflowered;
To think how he had ravished from the place
An everlasting pledge of their disgrace;
Elates and glorying in his slit-deal prize,
Not victory seemed so noble in his eyes.
Straight from Samogia's plains he sends express
To Codena the news of his success;
And straight the town resolves in form to meet
The conquering army, and their general greet."