Medolla

The name Medolla is thought to come from Medulla, a corruption of midolla, which here meant the straw hut: the first house of the people of this plain, when the land had not yet been drained. The arms, recognised in 1936 by decree of the head of government, still draw the village as it was inside the water: a motta rising out of the water, joined to dry land by a wooden bridge, with two poplars and a tall battifredo — that is, the motta of Montalbano and the sixteenth-century tower of Malcantone. The first news of Medolla is of 776, when Charlemagne gave the abbey of Nonantola the pieve of Camurana and the land belonging to it. It stood on the border between the duchy of Modena and Reggio, the Lombardo-Veneto and the Papal State, and next to Mirandola, the capital of the Pico: a village people passed through, and therefore traded in. On the first Sunday of July it still holds the Millenaria fiera di Bruino, which has been going on for more than a thousand years. The plague came in 1629 with the Landsknechts; in 1796 Napoleon came and Medolla ended up in the Cispadane Republic; it became a comune, with the frazioni it has today, on the first of January 1860.

On the twentieth of May 2012 the first great shock of the Emilia earthquake, with its epicentre at Finale Emilia, made the parish church of the saints Senesio and Teopompo unusable and brought down completely the churches of Camurana and of Villafranca: there were no victims. Nine days later, on the twenty-ninth of May, the second shock had its epicentre inside the territory of Medolla itself, and this time it did not take the churches: it took the factories. Whole firms and industrial sheds were destroyed, and six people died, four of them workers in the collapse of the biomedical plant Haemotronic. The town hall, the gymnasium, the library and the two nursery schools, one of them open only a few months, were all left unusable, and the spire of the bell tower was taken down before it could fall on the houses. Medolla is made of these two things together: fertile land, with one farm to every thirty-three inhabitants, pears, arable crops and Lambrusco, and biomedical companies known all over the world. That day the earthquake killed in the works, not in the church.