Borgo Val di Taro

This place was called Torresana and belonged to the abbey of San Colombano at Bobbio: its court was one of the vastest and most profitable possessions of the monastery, and the monks divided it among forty-seven livellari, that is tenants, who yielded income not only from fields and flocks but also from the transit of goods and people between the Po plain and the cities of Genoa and Lucca. Around the year one thousand two of those tenants, the Platoni and the Lusardi, badly supervised from Bobbio, began to consider the lands and the revenues entrusted to their management as their own property, and to divide them among their heirs: out of that quiet appropriation came the families that would make the history of the valley. Then the Platoni found they could not control what they had taken, and in the first half of the twelfth century they swore fealty and vassalage to the comune of Piacenza, adopting its laws and statutes — which would go on regulating the life of this community in the following centuries too.

In the thirteenth century the Fieschi, a powerful Genoese family, arrived in the valley, and for two hundred years they contended with the Landi of Piacenza the power over what the sources call the Republic of Borgo Val di Taro, leaving signs of good government documented by the agreements drawn up with the community. The Fieschi left the Borgo in 1547, after the failed conspiracy of Gianluigi Fieschi against Andrea Doria, in which many men of Borgotaro had taken part. The Landi returned, and behaved so oppressively that they were driven out on the twenty-third of February 1578. And in the list of the civic nobility that formed later under the Farnese — Bertucci, Boveri, Capredasca, Fenaroli, Manara, Piccenardi, Ruinaglia and others — the Platoni and the Lusardi are still there, seven centuries after keeping the abbey's lands for themselves. Between 1941 and 1943 Borgotaro was one of the Parma comuni used for the free internment of foreign Jews: more than forty refugees arrived from the Balkans and Dalmatia lived here under forced residence, and after the eighth of September, when the Germans came, they scattered, all of them managing to avoid capture and deportation. All but one: on the thirtieth of November 1943 Dora Klein was arrested here, a Polish woman who had taken her degree in medicine in 1936.