Busseto

Busseto was the capital of a state that no longer exists. Adalberto Pallavicino, the founder of the house, rebuilt its walls in 985 and put up the fortress there, and for the next five hundred years the town was the centre of the Stato Pallavicino, which spread as far as the Po, the Taro, the Ceno, the Stirone and the Ongina. Loyal to the emperor, in 1268, with the fall of the Hohenstaufen, Busseto paid for that loyalty with the complete destruction of its own walls. Rolando the Magnificent was the first to give the state settled laws, the Statuta Pallavicinia; and in 1533 Charles V, who was passing through, proclaimed the borgo a city to thank the Pallavicino for the loyalty they had shown. Ten years later the emperor came back, and on 21 June 1543 he met pope Paul III here to settle the opening of the Council of Trent.

The fortress where all this began still stands on the square, but the marquises are no longer inside it: rebuilt almost entirely in neo-Gothic style in the nineteenth century by an architect of theatres, it keeps its thirteenth-century keep and its main tower, and it houses the town hall and, within it, the Teatro Verdi. For the other thing Busseto is known for was born in a hamlet: at Roncole in 1813 Giuseppe Verdi was born, who moved into the town as a boy, and in the same hamlet lived Giovannino Guareschi, who set his Mondo piccolo there. Out of a handful of houses came the author of Nabucco and the author of don Camillo. In the oratory of the Santissima Trinità, next to the collegiate church, Verdi married Margherita Barezzi; and in the church of Santa Maria degli Angeli, built under the will of Rolando the Magnificent, there is a terracotta Lamentation over the dead Christ inside a false grotto.