San Prospero

In 1861, having found that the comune had no coat of arms, one was adopted with a simple symbolism: a star, standing for the comune's autonomy, and three ears of wheat, alluding to fertility and to work. It is a thing that says a good deal about this place: its history is not that of a castle or of a parish church, but that of a family and of a countryside. The family is the Castelvetri, one of the oldest and most illustrious of Modena, who had their estates here. The first records are of the early thirteen hundreds: in the codex Respublica Mutinensis, kept in the State Archive of Modena, Jacopo and Bartolomeo, sons of Giacomo Castelvetri, are named among those who in 1306 drove Azzo d'Este out of the city to restore the old Commune. The Castelvetri had made their fortune in the wool trade and then in banking, so much so that the Lancellotti Chronicles call Giacomo Castelvetro, a banker of the fourteen hundreds, «the richest citizen of Modena».

Out of this family came Ludovico Castelvetro, born at Modena in 1505 and dead at Chiavenna in 1571, a man of letters and a philologist of clear fame. And the family, when it died out, was not allowed to die: in 1696 duke Rinaldo d'Este had given Ercole Castelvetri the title of marquis, and at the end of the house he wanted the son born of the marriage of Anna Castelvetri, last of the name, with Flaminio Cantuti to take his mother's surname — and from that the Cantuti Castelvetri were born. In the territory, at San Pietro in Elda, which was once called Verdeta, stand the towers of Verdeta, which belonged to the Cantuti Castelvetri and then to other families down to the duke of Modena: over the centuries they had two functions at once, the military one of a watchtower and the far more prosaic one of storing grain. The parish church of San Prospero was built in 1779. And the village still carries the marks of the Emilia earthquakes of 2012, which damaged above all the older houses and the farm buildings.