Concordia sulla Secchia

The village's name is an agreement. One reading traces it to the pact of 1360 by which Parma, Reggio, Modena, Mantua and Ferrara came to terms over the diversion of the Po; another to the fortress called Concordia in memory of the peace and good concord with all its enemies in the time of the Pico. The Pico della Mirandola held this place for four hundred years, from 1311 to 1711, and the first of them obtained from the emperor permission to install floating mills on the Secchia: those mills supported the village's economy for centuries. In 1511 the Augustinian convent gave lodging to a brother of the order passing through on his way to Rome, Martin Luther.

In 1713, while rebuilding the village after the French siege and fire, the nine floating mills were taken out of the river: they were held to be the main cause of the Secchia's floods. Thirty years later four of them were put back, and they ground until the end of the nineteenth century, when a steam mill replaced them in 1885. The river, after all, was here before the village: in the Val di Sole nature reserve a medieval wood has come to light, eighty-two great stumps and sixty-four trunks up to nine metres long. And the ground still moves: the earthquake of the twenty-ninth of May 2012 damaged the church, the town hall and the whole historic centre.