Torrile

The town hall of Torrile is not at Torrile. It is at San Polo, the most populous hamlet, where the industries and the railway station are, and getting there took an argument: for some years the municipal seat was housed inside the villa Rossi at Gainago, which was the mayor's residence, and where it should be was disputed precisely with San Polo, which in the end won out. A good part of this story is explained by the ground. We are in the lower Parma country, on the flat, crossed from south to north by the Parma torrent and by a network of canals, and for centuries the area stayed inhospitable: marshes, thick scrub and floods so violent that the torrent repeatedly moved its own bed, destroying the settlements that stood near it. The land that guaranteed a sure income was the rice paddy; and the paddy made people ill, because it favoured malaria and pellagra. At Gainago the last paddies were drained only at the beginning of the nineteenth century, by the five noble families who owned the land in the area.

The oldest thing in the place is Roman: a marble slab known as the stele of the Lucretii, dated to 98 and today in the national archaeological museum of Parma. The village appears in 1187, when the church of San Biagio of Torrile is listed among the goods that a papal bull confirms to the Benedictine nuns of the monastery of San Paolo in Parma. In 1297 the comune of Parma, which was Guelph, had the castle that the Ghibelline Baldichini held at Rivarolo pulled down, and their strong house at Torrile with it, and laid down by statute that they should never be rebuilt. Later the Farnese turned a vast state-owned oak wood into the Ducal Wood of Torrile, the family's hunting reserve, and in the second half of the eighteenth century joined it directly to the palace of Colorno by a road designed by the ducal engineer; when the duchy was annexed to the French empire the trees were uprooted and the whole thing became cultivated country.