Montechiarugolo

The castle and the county are the same thing here: the fief passed to the Torelli in the fifteenth century and was raised to a county in 1428, and from there Montechiarugolo commanded the lands around. It all ended in a trial. In 1612 count Pio Torelli was accused, together with Barbara Sanseverino and many other nobles of the Parma country, of taking part in an alleged conspiracy against duke Ranuccio I Farnese: a death sentence and the confiscation of every asset, the fief absorbed by the Ducal Chamber and the village set on a slow decline.

The manor had two further seasons, though. On the fourth of October 1796 a column of Austrians in flight from Mantua barricaded itself inside, and the newborn Reggio Republic, with a few French soldiers, forced it to surrender; Napoleon himself commemorated the two men of Reggio who fell and praised the feat, which many regard as the first hint of the Risorgimento. Between June 1940 and the summer of 1943 a wing of the same castle was instead adapted into a civilian internment camp for men.