Gossolengo

There is an elephant on the coat of arms of Gossolengo, and the reason is a village story worth telling in full. Tradition says the name comes from «osso lungo», long bone: the femur of a large mammal found in a ditch, which was taken to belong to an African elephant, because Hannibal's troops had passed this way — on the Trebbia, on 18 December 218 before Christ, the Carthaginians beat the legions of the consul Tiberius Sempronius Longus. Linguists, however, see it differently: for Giovan Battista Pellegrini the suffix -engo betrays a Germanic origin, from the personal name Gauzilo or from an ethnonym pointing to the Goths, and the chain of documents bears it out — Gondolenci in the tenth and eleventh centuries, Goselengi in the thirteenth, then Gossolengi and Gosolengo. The elephant, in short, is on the shield because of a misread bone.

The Trebbia gave the village a second battle two thousand years after the first: in 1799 the French and the Austro-Russians clashed hereabouts and general Suvorov won, whereupon he promptly set Gossolengo on fire along with the other villages of the area. The river again, and war again: from December 1917 there was a camp along the Trebbia for Italian soldiers considered deserters, in the summer of 1918 it became a camp for Austrian, German and Hungarian prisoners — more than two thousand — and when the war ended it was refitted to receive the returning Italians, coming to hold up to sixty thousand people within a few days, who stayed there until Christmas. Quieter matters: the town hall, in piazza Roma, stands exactly on the forty-fifth parallel; and in 1877, ploughing a field at Ciavernasco di Settima, a farmer turned up the bronze Etruscan liver used for divination, now in Piacenza.