Cavezzo

Until the time of Matilda of Canossa the river Secchia ran through the middle of the village. Then, because of the continual floods, it was partly buried, and in its place there remained the canals that still today run beneath the houses — canals that, the source says, link Cavezzo to Venice and to Ravenna. The ground is what the water left behind: rises, mounds and marshy hollows, and it is precisely from there that one of the two hypotheses on the name starts, from the root cava, a cavity. The other derives it from the Latin cavaedium, a space enclosed by walls; and here the source has the honesty to add that, before accepting it, one would have to find out whether those walls really existed and where. The village appears in a document of the twelfth century and then, in 1203, as the Island of Sant'Egidio, because in that year an oratory was raised there in the saint's honour; the name Cavaedicium turns up only in 1322. In some documents of 1349, in the middle of the Black Death, there is mention instead of the catacombs dug in the surrounding countryside, because the dead were too many.

As a comune, Cavezzo came late: until the end of the eighteenth century it was classified simply as a villa, it became a municipality in the Napoleonic period, was then aggregated as a section to the comune of Mirandola, and only in 1860, with the Kingdom of Italy, obtained its autonomy. The coat of arms too exists in two versions that do not coincide: the one granted by royal decree shows the marshy zone with the island of Sant'Egidio and the remains of a column, recalling the place where the old church of San Silvestro stood, while the municipal statute describes another one, with a truncated square-based tower on marshy ground and a nine-pointed crown. The war memorial fared even worse: the Lion was inaugurated in 1922 and dismantled twenty years later, railing included, so that its metal could be reused for military needs; then a stele with the names was long discussed without agreement being reached, and for years only a memorial stone remained. The lion was recast only in the new century. On the twenty-ninth of May 2012 the Emilia earthquake killed two people here and destroyed many areas of the village.