Aceto Balsamico di Modena cooked grape must and wine vinegar, dense and sweet-and-sour
Cooked grape must and wine vinegar aged in wooden barrels: Aceto Balsamico di Modena has held Protected Geographical Indication status since 2009.
Read more →This place was once called Wilzacara and it was a wood: in the year 825 the emperor Lothair I gave the vast forest of Wilzacara to the abbey of Nonantola, and the Benedictine monks drained it, farmed it and brought here the cult of San Cesario of Terracina. In 945 the marquis Berengar, later king of Italy, set the territory to cultivation and raised a castle, or a borgo, with many buildings and a chapel in honour of San Cesario, who was taken as patron; the sources add another reason for the choice, the Panaro, which divides this territory from Spilamberto and which in the past was always violent and dangerous. The name changed when the owner changed: in 1112 countess Matilde di Canossa took the court and the forest of Vilzacara away from the monks of Nonantola and passed them to the local church, the one dedicated to the martyr Cesario, and from then on Wilzacara slowly disappears from the documents and San Cesario stays in its place. A pope died near here too, Adrian III, on his way to Worms, where the emperor Charles the Fat had called a diet to discuss the reorganisation of the empire: his body is kept at Nonantola.
In 1446 the marquis of Ferrara Leonello d'Este raised San Cesario to a county and granted the jurisdiction to Albertino III Boschetti and his heirs; their feudal palace, built in the fourteen hundreds and turned into a villa in the following century, belongs today to the comune and houses the library. To the clock tower there is still attached a stretch of the walls the Modenese put up in 1190. In the parish church — which some hold to stand above a pagan temple of Apollo, and which has three naves marked out by Roman columns with pre-Romanesque capitals — the sacristy keeps the lower jawbone of the patron saint, set in a silver reliquary of the sixteen hundreds: in 1639 don Agostino da Vignola, rector of the basilica, asked the monastery of San Pietro of Modena for that relic and obtained it, through the good offices of count Luigi Boschetti. The arms, granted in 1862, carry a ruined castle with a lion standing guard, because in late medieval documents the old castle of Vilzacara was called Castel Leone; and the crown on the shield is the one the rules of the time laid down for comuni of fewer than three thousand inhabitants. In the industrial zone of the same village, today, they build the Pagani cars.
🍝 The flavours of San Cesario sul Panaro
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Near San Cesario sul Panaro
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
Places to see within 25 km
Outside San Cesario sul Panaro, but an easy day trip away.
Museo storico militare Brigata Catanzaro 📍 Catanzaro · 7.8 km Catanzaro museum of the Catanzaro Brigade: arms, uniforms and relics from Napoleon to the Second World War. Chiesa di Sant'Omobono 📍 Catanzaro · 9.0 km Catanzaro church with Norman-Byzantine features, described as the oldest place of worship in the city. Basilica dell'Immacolata Concezione 📍 Catanzaro · 9.3 km Catanzaro basilica built in 1254, dedicated to the Immaculate Conception, patron of the city. Chiesa del Santissimo Rosario 📍 Catanzaro · 9.5 km Fifteenth-century church in Catanzaro, consecrated in 1499, with a Baroque mother-of-pearl altar. Villa Margherita 📍 Catanzaro · 9.7 km Catanzaro's oldest public garden, of 1881, with an archaeological museum, a library and a view over the gulf. Castello normanno-svevo di Nicastro 📍 Lamezia Terme · 16 km Medieval castle on the hill of San Teodoro in Nicastro, with cylindrical towers and a pentagonal keep.