San Secondo Parmense

San Secondo stands where the river used to run. Today's village was founded only between the thirteen and fourteen hundreds, because the position it occupies was then occupied by the course of the Taro: the palaeochannel, with its meandering line, can still be clearly seen south of the built-up area and passes through the village itself. The first settlement stood elsewhere, probably a kilometre further north and shifted west, and it is from there that the finds come: at the end of the eighteen hundreds Luigi Pigorini identified at the place called Copezzato a terramare settlement of the Bronze Age, and in 1973, at the edge of a quarry, at two and a half metres down, there turned up by chance a terracotta cinerary vase with jewels and a coin, a Roman as datable to around 150 before Christ; other urns, of a later Roman period, came to light afterwards. Tombs of different periods in the same place mean that the settlement of the land had never been interrupted. The find, what is more, is a short way from the Roman road that led towards Cremona, whose route is still a roadbed today and crosses the old centre as via Garibaldi.

The name comes from a little church built between the eighth and the ninth century and dedicated to San Secondo of Asti. And the first time that name appears in a document it does not stand for a village, but for a sheet of water: in 894 a diploma of king Arnulf of Carinthia, listing the possessions of the Chapter of Parma cathedral, cites a «Lacum Sancti Secundi» — the lake of San Secondo, which was perhaps a marsh fed by the bed of the Taro as it silted up. The territory is entirely flat and bounded on three sides by water: the Taro to the east, the Stirone to the north, the Rovacchia to the west. And one of those waters has been a boundary for two thousand years: the fossaccia Scannabecco, which runs west of the village, in Roman imperial times marked the centuriated division between the municipia of Parma and Fidentia. The comune was called simply San Secondo until 1862.