Rovigo

Rovigo enter the new Top10 season as holders of everything Italian rugby offered them last year. In 2025 Rugby Rovigo Delta won the championship, the Coppa Italia and the Supercoppa Italiana, the last of those for the first time. It was a return to the top for a club that had already won the Coppa Italia in 2020 and the league in 2016, 2021 and 2023.

The name is newer than the club. In 2010 Rovigo restructured because of financial difficulties. They added "Delta" to the title to reach the whole Po Delta province and to bring in Delta Group Agroalimentare as sponsor. The town's own rugby was there to be saved, and the wider name was the price of saving it.

The beginnings were more modest. Dino Lanzoni, a medical student, picked up rugby at the University of Padua and brought it home to Rovigo in 1935. For the 1935–36 season he bought second-hand shirts from the Bologna football club. That is why the team plays in red and blue, and the "Rossoblu" nickname followed. The other name, I Bersaglieri, comes from the club's badge, the cap of the elite Italian sharpshooters.

The most direct measure of the club's standing is the rivalry with Petrarca Padova. Their meetings are called the Derby dell'Adige, or sometimes the Derby d'Italia, and are treated as a contest between two cities. Lanzoni's Padua years give that rivalry a longer history than the fixture list does.

Rovigo's first great run came in the early 1950s, with four titles in a row from 1950–51 to 1953–54. Since the years after the Second World War they have not been relegated from the top flight. Their most recent title, in 2024–25, was their fifteenth.