Moscufo

The name is not settled: perhaps from Moscosus, perhaps from Muskulf, a Lombard chief said to have pitched his camp on the plateau where the cemetery and the abbey now stand — and an identical place name seems to exist in the Fulda region of Germany. The shape of the fortified borgo is Carolingian, and the names still say so: the two entrances of the village are called porta cieca and porta furia, and there is a via del Castello. A stretch of wall and a brick bastion towards the Tavo valley are still standing, while out in the fields there are the watchtowers raised during the Turkish raids: the nearest tower-house is dated by a majolica tile to 1527.

The abbey of Santa Maria del Lago takes its name not from a lake but from the wood, the Latin lucus. Inside, under twelfth-century frescoes, is its masterpiece: the polychrome ambo of master Nicodemo, signed and dated 1159, carved with David killing the lion, Jonah swallowed and cast up by the fish, Saint George and the dragon, fantastic animals and misshapen human figures used as telamons, and with the symbols of the Tetramorph larger and in deeper relief. What makes it rare is the colour: the traces of polychromy left on it are one of the few visible witnesses of a practice once very widespread, the painting of sculpture. The church also keeps a Madonna and Child of about 1465 by Andrea De Litio. And in the cemetery next door, founded in Napoleonic times, the people of Moscufo built their family chapels as small copies of that same church.