1901)
4307 (town), 19,078 (commune). It is connected by a navigable canal with
Ferrara. It was the birthplace of the painter Giovanni Francesco
Barbieri (Guercino). The communal picture-gallery and several churches
contain works by him, but none of first-rate importance. A statue of him
stands in front of the 16th century Palazzo Governativo. The town was
surrounded by walls, the gates of which are preserved. The origin of the
name is uncertain.

CENTO (Gr. _[Greek: kentron]_, Lat. _cento_, patchwork), a composition
made up by collecting passages from various works. The Byzantine Greeks
manufactured several out of the poems of Homer, among which may be
mentioned the life of Christ by the famous empress Eudoxia, and a
version of the Biblical history of Eden and the Fall. The Romans of the
later empire and the monks of the middle ages were fond of constructing
poems out of the verse of Virgil. Such were the _Cento Nuptialis_ of
Ausonius, the sketch of Biblical history which was compiled in the 4th
century by Proba Falconia, wife of a Roman proconsul, and the hymns in
honour of St Quirinus taken from Virgil and Horace by Metellus, a monk
of Tegernsee, in the latter half of the 12th century. Specimens may be
found in the work of Aldus Manutius (Venice, 1504; Frankfort, 1541,
1544). In 1535 Laelius Capitulus produced from Virgil an attack upon the
dissolute lives of the monks; in 1536 there appeared at Venice a
_Petrarca Spirituale_; and in 1634 Alexander Ross (a Scotsman, and one
of the chaplains of Charles I.) published a _Virgilius Evangelizans, seu
Historia Domini nostri Jesu Christi Virgilianis verbis et versibus
descripta_.

CENTRAL AMERICA, that portion of the American continent which lies
between Mexico and Colombia, comprising the British crown colony of
British Honduras, and the six independent republics of Guatemala,
Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Panama. These seven
divisions are described in separate articles. Central America is bounded
towards the N. by the Caribbean Sea, and towards the S. by the Pacific
Ocean, and extends between 7 Deg. 12' and 18 Deg. 3' N. and between 77
Deg. 12' and 92 Deg. 17' W. It has an area of about 208,500 sq. m., and
stretches for some 1300 m. from N.W. to S.E., in a succession of three
serpentine curves, reaching its greatest breadth, 450 m., between the
Peninsula of Nicoya and the north coast of Honduras, and diminishing to
35 m. in the Isthmus of Pana