Via Vignatagliata, on the corner where it meets Via Mazzini, is the setting of one of the most emotional, intense scenes in Bassani's The Novel of Ferrara. In it, protagonist Geo Josz returns to his home town as the sole survivor of those from the local Jewish community to be deported to Buchenwald. At this corner, Josz publicly slaps Count Lionello Scocca, who was an OVRA (Opera Vigilanza Repressione Antifascista) informer, Italy's secret police under Fascism from 1930 to 1943, and during the Italian Social Republic from 1943 to 1945.

‘From the beginning, what happened seemed impossible. No one could believe it. They just couldn’t imagine a scene in which Geo, who entered with his usual padded steps into Count Scocca's field of vision as he stood at the corner of Via Vignatagliata, then, with a sudden bestial fury, delivered to the parchmenty cheeks of that old, resuscitated carrion two dry, really hard slaps, more worthy of a Fascist trooper of Balbo and his companions’ times, as some actually remarked, rather than of a survivor of the German gas chambers. ...It made one almost doubt, not only the basis of each of these accounts but even the real, objective event itself, that same double slap, so full and resounding, according to general opinion, as to be heard for almost the entire length of Via Mazzini, from the corner of Piazza delle Erbe, down there at the end, as far at least as the Jewish Temple.

(G. Bassani, ‘A Memorial Tablet in Via Mazzini’, in The Novel of Ferrara, translated by Jamie McKendrick, W. W. Norton & Company, 16 October 2018, e-book version, location 1391)