Cicciano

In the arms of Cicciano there is a hand caressing a woman's breast, and the explanation the village gives itself is that a copyist is to blame. Local tradition says that the old arms showed an apple held in a hand, standing for the fertility of the land, and that a scribe, copying it onto certain official documents, misread the drawing; the mistake stayed, and it has fused with the popular etymology of the name, which derives it from the dialect word «zizza», that is breast, whence «zizzano». Scholars, less amusingly, propose other things: for Capolongo the name comes from citianum, from the Roman name Citius or Cittius; others from an owner Cipius or Caepius; others again from Circianum, the circle, from the place where hoops for barrels were made. The first documents name Cicianu in 950 and Curanu in 967.

At the end of the thirteenth century the knights of the Order of Saint John of Jerusalem settled in the casale with a domus of their own, which in the following century became a Commenda and then a Commenda Magistrale. They built the Castro at the place called Lo Ponte: not a castle in the strict sense, but an enclosed and defended space, a quadrilateral with a ring of walls and a moat about eight metres wide, a perimeter of three hundred and thirty metres and a surface of more than two thousand five hundred square metres. Inside was a small village: the commander's palace, the church of San Pietro Apostolo, the civil prison and the criminal one, a spring well, two courtyards, storerooms and a fair number of private houses. One entered by a single great door, on the south side, after a drawbridge and a rivellino — which by the seventeenth century had lost its military purpose and become a garden with flower beds and three pavilions.