Colorno

The town takes its name from the Lorno stream that runs through it, and appears in the documents around 1004, in a deed establishing the ownership of certain properties of the bishopric of Parma. It was one of the few places to resist the advance of Frederick the Second in 1247, when the emperor came down to punish Parma for its disloyalty. In 1458 Francesco Sforza granted the fief to the Sanseverino, who held it until 1612 and made Colorno the capital of their marquisate: the marquis's crown is still in the municipal arms. On the twenty-ninth of June 1734, during the War of the Polish Succession, the battle of Colorno was fought on this plain between Franco-Sardinian and Austrian troops. The Ducal Palace was built in the eighteenth century for the Farnese, and later Marie-Louise of Habsburg chose it as her summer residence and had it enlarged.

Inside that palace today sits ALMA, the international school of Italian cooking, and the town keeps a dish of its own, the tortéj dóls, tortelli with a sweet and sour filling whose recipe is handed down from the duchess's time. But Colorno also had a psychiatric hospital, and in 1975 four directors — Marco Bellocchio, Silvano Agosti, Sandro Petraglia and Stefano Rulli — filmed inside it the documentary Matti da slegare, which follows the stories of some of the patients and argues Franco Basaglia's theses on mental illness; that same year the film was shown at the Berlin festival.