Soragna

Soragna appears for the first time on 2 August 712, in a document of the Lombard king Liutprand. In 962 the emperor Otto I assigned the lands between Busseto and Soragna to the marquis Oberto, and his son Adalberto I, ancestor of the Pallavicino, had the castle built in 985 to defend the village. Then, in 1198, the fief was cut in two along the Stirone torrent, probably for reasons of inheritance: the left bank, with the borgo of Soragna, went to Guido I Lupi, founder of the line; the right, with Castellina and the Castrum Vetus de Soranea, stayed with the Pallavicino. Guido began at once to build the Castrum Novus, and around it grew the Burgus Luporum. The castle was taken and destroyed more than once: in 1186 by Guelph forces, in 1345 by the Milanese, and in 1385 Gian Galeazzo Visconti granted the Lupi the right to rebuild it.

In 1347 Charles IV of Luxembourg assigned the fief to Ugolotto and Raimondino Lupi and raised it to an imperial marquisate; in 1709 it became a principate, with the right to mint coin. What was the fortress is now the Rocca Meli Lupi, turned into a palace: inside are 16th-century frescoes by Cesare Baglione and perhaps by Niccolò dell'Abbate, and the park around it was redrawn as an English garden about 1820. In 1305 the Lupi, the Rossi and the Scorza, banished from Parma by Giberto III da Correggio, shut themselves in here with the support of the marquis of Ferrara and held out twenty-two days of siege before surrendering. The oldest traces in the territory are much older than all this: a pile-dwelling village of the Bronze Age.