Castelvetro Piacentino

The name of this village is a mistake that stuck. The right form would be Castelvecchio, because anciently it was called Castrum vetus; from that came the vulgarised Latin Castellum vetus, then shortened to Castelvetus and Italianised into Castelvetro — a deformation, in short, but the one that has lasted. The arms have suffered the same fate: they derive from the blazon of the Coppalati, marquises of Castelvetro, but the bows that appear on them, adopted from 1889 and attested even earlier, are said to be a corruption of the Farnese lilies; and in older representations, in place of the tower, there was a castle with three crenellated turrets. In this village, in short, things have been corrupted twice, and both times it is the wrong version that has stayed. Castelvetro is the lowest-lying comune of the province of Piacenza, at the northern edge of Emilia-Romagna, on the Po, on the border with the province of Cremona.

Its origin goes back to a Roman fortress, which by the twelve hundreds was already reduced to a heap of ruins, along with the walls that surrounded it. The first document that mentions the existence of the borgo is a Cremonese parchment of the fifteenth of October of 1055: it concerns the investiture, in favour of the canons of Cremona cathedral, of lands in various places, among them Castelvetro, which belonged to those canons for a long time. The village then followed the fortunes of Cremona, was incorporated into the Pallavicino state, absorbed by the Duchy of Milan and finally passed to the Farnese, who in 1698 granted it in investiture to the marquis Federico Coppalati; and of that family one member, don Gherardo, was parish priest of Castelvetro from 1724 to 1745. The Coppalati held it until the early eighteen hundreds, and in 1814 the village was promoted to the seat of the comune. One thing is worth telling in full: at the feast of the Madonna del Rosario, in the parish of the Spirito Santo in Croce, in 1837 a very young Giuseppe Verdi was invited to conduct his own Messa solenne. In the same church there is a Lingiardi organ of 1865. The railway station, opened in 1933, has been without passenger traffic since 2013.