Cadeo

The name of Cadeo is a building: in 1112 a devout man called Ghisulfo, or Gandolfo, opened a hospitale here for the pilgrims walking to Rome, and people called it la casa di Dio, the house of God — hence Cadeo. The road is the via Emilia and the traffic was pilgrims. But standing on a road, here, meant burning. In 1309 one thousand three hundred Ghibelline soldiers come from Parma gathered in the castle of Cadeo against the Guelph family of the Da Fontana, and the year after Alberto Scotti destroyed it for that. In 1322 Galeazzo Visconti had the village destroyed, out of enmity with the prior of Cadeo, Ribaldo del Cario, who nonetheless got away. It was destroyed again in 1336, once more by the Visconti, then in 1353 by Cremonese troops, and a last devastation was brought by a Sanvitale in 1449. Of the hospital, today, one heavily altered façade remains; the castle, on the other hand, is in good condition.

The rents of the hospital were assigned by the pope to cardinal Castiglione in the fourteen hundreds, passed then to the Lateran canons of Sant'Agostino and, at the end of the seventeen hundreds, to the Opera Pia Alberoni. With the comuni born of the Napoleonic reforms, Cadeo was included in that of Carpaneto Piacentino, and became a comune of its own only in June 1820. Then it lost its own centre as well: the seat stood in a palace facing the church of San Pietro, but from 1931 it was moved to the frazione of Roveleto, which had grown a great deal under an expansion plan wanted by the mayor Castellari, and there it has stayed — so the comune of Cadeo is administered from Roveleto. The arms keep the memory of what the place has been: they carry the façade of the old Augustinian hospital and two pilgrim staves crossed. Near the frazione of Saliceto the territory is crossed by the forty-fifth parallel, the line halfway between the pole and the equator. And from here come the actress Olimpia Cavalli and the racer Tarquinio Provini.