Traversetolo

Not far from the hamlet of Torre the ground burbles. These are the barboj, small mud volcanoes that owe their name precisely to the noise accompanying the methane escaping from below, and they are the most important formations of their kind in western Emilia: from the pools comes a muddy, salty water that until the nineteenth century was used as a cure. The name of the village speaks of position too: it probably comes from transversus, oblique, because the place lies crosswise; others derive it from transducere, to cross, because the first hilltop settlements were reached by crossing the marshes down in the valley.

How old the human presence is here was discovered by accident: in March 2017, digging at Torrazzo to build a supermarket, workers uncovered thirty-two structures and four tombs of the Neolithic, the oldest known settlement in the area. As early as 1863 Luigi Pigorini had identified two terramare here. The name, instead, appears for the first time on the eighteenth of March 991, in a parchment written at Pavia recording a sale of land by Prangarda, daughter of Adalberto Atto of Canossa. Above the village watched the castle of Guardasone, guarding the ford over the Enza: taken, retaken and destroyed so many times that the list reads like an accounts ledger.