Noceto

Noceto has 12,705 inhabitants west of Parma, and the name is all in the coat of arms: a walnut tree, which is a canting arms, with a hill for the woods around and a tower for the old castle. As a community the village appears for the first time in 835, when queen Cunegonda gave the property of the place to the Benedictine nuns of Sant'Alessandro; from the eleventh century on it was a fortified town, and for four centuries people fought over it. In 1481 the Rossi strengthened the fortress against an invasion by the Sforza, called in by the Sanvitale; the Sforza besieged Noceto in the April of the following year, and Pier Maria de' Rossi, after a stubborn resistance, was left without allies and had to hand the town back.

The end of that world came instead through a torture chamber. In the spring of 1611 Alfonso Sanvitale, count of Fontanellato, and Onofrio Martani were arrested; the second, under torture, revealed a possible plot against the duke of Parma, Ranuccio Farnese. The following year members of Alfonso's family were arrested and sentenced to death, and the lands of the Parma country, Noceto among them, were redistributed: part to the marchesi Dalla Rosa, part left to the Sanvitale. Later, under the Bourbons, the first networks of canals were dug, the place slowly stopped being a fortress, and in 1795 the comune of Noceto was born. Outside, at Sanguinaro, on the via Emilia, the church of Santi Simone e Giuda was raised in the eleventh century and altered by the Hospitaller knights; later abandoned by the Knights of Malta and sold to private owners, it still keeps intact its apse, with late-Gothic frescoes, and its crypt.