Borgonovo Val Tidone

Borgonovo did not grow: it was designed. In 1196 the Guelph comune of Piacenza founded a new settlement here to defend the lower Val Tidone from the designs of Bobbio and Pavia, and it did so on the drawing board: a rectangular plan, streets parallel and transverse at right angles, walls, only two gates — one north and one south — and a deep moat filled with water in time of war. The name says exactly that, new town. It did not have time to be finished: after three years the Pavian militias destroyed it. The consuls of Piacenza rebuilt it and this time added a fortress on the north side. In 1215 the Pavians came back and the fortress held. When the feudal lord died in 1438 the territory was shared out among three lords, and the fortress went to the condottiero Niccolò Piccinino; then Francesco Sforza made it a county and in 1451 gave it as a dowry to his son, who had married a Dal Verme: a fief created to buy an alliance.

The fortress stayed in private hands for centuries, even after Napoleon took the fief from the marquises who owned it. The comune bought it only in 1875, and put the town hall and the magistrate's court inside; in the same period the walls of the town were pulled down entirely and replaced by ring boulevards, so that of the design of 1196 there remain today the right-angled streets but not the enclosure. In 2015 the council asked the region to begin a merger with the neighbouring comune of Ziano Piacentino: at the referendum the following year, yes won at Borgonovo and no at Ziano, and Ziano's no stopped everything. From here, finally, come two trades as far apart as can be: in the hamlet of Bilegno was born the violin-maker Giovanni Battista Guadagnini, and in the town Ettore Boiardi, the cook who in the United States became a brand of ready-made sauces.