Fontevivo

When Fontevivo became a comune in the nineteenth century, it took as its coat of arms the old arms of the abbey of San Bernardo: the village, that is, put on the symbol of the building it had grown around. That Cistercian abbey was founded in 1142 as a dependency of Chiaravalle della Colomba, under the protection of the Pallavicino marquises, and since then it has changed trade as often as the chance came: in 1605 duke Ranuccio I Farnese bought the monastery, in 1733 duke Charles of Bourbon had it rebuilt in neoclassical style to make it the summer seat of the College of Nobles of Parma, and in 1987 the comune bought it and put in a hotel, a restaurant and the small Museum of Accordions. The church, meanwhile, has stayed a church, and inside it keeps a polychrome stone Madonna and Child of the twelfth century attributed to Benedetto Antelami and the tomb slab of the Templar Guidone Pallavicino, who died in 1301.

The same thing, for worse and then for better, happened to the church of the Capuchins, which Ranuccio I had built shortly afterwards, linking it to San Bernardo by an avenue made on purpose. In 1805 the Napoleonic decrees closed the convent, the church was deconsecrated and emptied of everything; in 1881 the complex was demolished except the temple, which was sold off to private owners and used as a warehouse; around 1980 the comune expropriated it and began its recovery, and between 2007 and 2009 the frescoes attributed to Cesare Baglioni came back to light. At Castelguelfo, on the other side of the via Emilia from the castle, there stands instead a Romanesque church built at the beginning of the thirteenth century by the French Benedictine monks of the abbey of Vézelay, in Burgundy: the name too, Santa Maria Maddalena, is the one from their own home.