Castel San Giovanni

Castel San Giovanni has 13,629 inhabitants in the lower Val Tidone and is the last Emilian comune before Lombardy. Its history is that of a contested place of passage: the castle of Olubra, which stood where the town is today, was besieged twice without success by king Enzo, son of Frederick II; in 1252 a man from Pavia destroyed it, and in 1290 Alberto Scotti, lord of Piacenza, rebuilt it. Then came the Dal Verme, the Pallavicino and finally the Farnese. That position still counts: beside the motorway exit there is now Amazon's largest logistics centre in Italy.

The most unusual thing, though, is in two hamlets on the embankment of the Po, Bosco Tosca and Pievetta. In the seventeenth century Arbëreshë communities settled there, that is Italo-Albanians: they are the only ones in northern Italy. Of that arrival there remain the surnames — Albanesi, Tosca — and funeral customs and recipes that have stayed different from those around here. From the twentieth century there remains a wound instead: on the first of December 1943 Tina Pesaro was arrested in the town, and from there deported to Auschwitz.