Zocca

The arms of Zocca are a phoenix rising from the fire, with the motto Post fata resurgo, and it is not a conventional image: the comune really had been abolished and made again. Included in 1797 in the community of Montalbano, it was annexed to Montecorone when that was dissolved; it had a brief independence under the Napoleonic republic and with the Restoration ended up inside Guiglia; it was re-established as a comune only in 1859, with the end of the duchy of Modena and Reggio. The phoenix was chosen around 1860 by Luigi Carlo Farini. Behind the shield is a caduceus, for trade: in 1465 duke Borso d'Este allowed the men of Montetortore to hold a market twice a year, and the settlement grew around that trade. The name comes from zòca, which in the Frignano dialect is the stump, and here it was chestnut; it is attested from 1337.

About five hundred men left Zocca for the First World War, and nearly a third did not come back. In the Second the village was an active centre of the Resistance and paid for it: on 18 August 1944 a unit of the Guardia Nazionale Repubblicana hanged twenty men in the eccidio dei Boschi di Ciano, and Zocca holds the gold medal for civil merit for the antifascist struggle of 1943-44. On 18 September 1975, again here, Punto Radio was born, one of the first free radio stations in Italy: among its founders was Vasco Rossi, who was born in Zocca. On the table there are crescentine, cooked between terracotta tigelle heated in the embers, once with a chestnut leaf; and in October, for three Sundays, comes the chestnut fair.