Vergato

Four explanations circulate for the name of Vergato. The town grew around a few inns where travellers bound for Tuscany stopped before crossing the Reno, and some derive the name from the Latin Varegatum, that is a ford; some from virga, a green twig; some from virgatus, woven of rods; and some from vergato, a striped cloth produced here for centuries. The coat of arms, recognised in 1937, does not choose: it puts there a boar bristling with twigs, and by a play on words it holds two different readings together while adding a third. It is a canting coat of arms that speaks of an unresolved debate, and resolves it by making a joke.

The town, after all, has a long habit of arguing about how to represent itself. The palace of the Captains of the Mountain, which is the town hall and keeps on its façade the carved arms of the captains who followed one another, is not medieval: it was rebuilt in 1885 in a medievalising style to a design by Alfonso Rubbiani and Tito Azzolini. The public park is called the Pincio, like the one in Rome, and belongs to a fashion born after 1870, when Rome became the capital: in several Italian towns gardens were built that took up its name and its features too, the evergreens, the geometric paths and the panoramic terrace, which here is decorated with small obelisks. Then the bombs of the Second World War destroyed almost everything else. The stained-glass windows of the council chamber are from 1998 and were made by Luigi Ontani, who was born here: an allegorical statue of his, a faun with a winged putto on its shoulders, set off a national quarrel.