Sorbolo Mezzani

Sorbolo Mezzani has 12,984 inhabitants in the lower Parma plain, where the Po forms the border with Lombardy. As a comune it is brand new, born on the first of January 2019 from the merger of Sorbolo and Mezzani, but the two names it joins are old and say two different things. Sorbolo comes from the Latin sorbus, the service tree: a fruit tree once common here and today so rare in Emilia-Romagna that it is protected as a native species. Mezzani comes instead from medianus, "the one in the middle", which was the name given to the river islands of the Po; that is why the banks of the river are full of places called Mezzano or Mezzana.

Because these were islands, the documents had to chase the river. Casale, the oldest inhabited centre, is described in 890 as insula iuxta Padum, an island next to the Po; some centuries later the same place is Casalis Ripae Padi, Casale on the bank of the Po. The settlement had not moved: the river had, northwards. And it went on moving, so much so that one piece of this comune, the island of Fossacaprara, now lies beyond the Po and is practically attached to the Lombard shore. Along the water the ground is still read in two ways: the open golena, without dykes, where nobody lives and there are willow beds, oxbow lakes and poplar plantations, and the closed golena behind the consortium banks, where the soil is fertile and the houses and fields are.