Gragnano Trebbiense

This plain between the Trebbia and the Luretta stream has seen three battles more than two thousand years apart from one another. The first is the one Polybius tells: in December of 218 BC Hannibal heavily defeated the consul Tiberius Sempronius Longus: the Carthaginians, camped towards Tavernago, managed to pin the Roman infantry in the marshy bed of the Luretta, and the Numidian cavalry backed by archers made a slaughter of them — only a third of the soldiers got across to the other bank of the Trebbia. In 889, on the same banks, the armies of Berengar I of Friuli and Guy II of Spoleto faced each other, both claiming the crown of king of Italy: the second won. And in 1799, between Gragnano and Rottofreno, the French of general MacDonald were forced to fall back towards La Spezia by the Austro-Russians of Suvorov.

The name, instead, may come from a man: from the Latin granianus, that is, from one Granius, a Roman landowner who had his estates here. There is however another explanation, the one they like better in the village: that it comes from grain and granaries, because the fields yielded so much that bigger ones had to be built every year — and that is why there is an ear of wheat on the arms. The comune, at any rate, took a while to give itself a house: until 1874 it had no fixed seat, the council met in private houses, often at the mayor's even when he lived outside the comune, and the elections were held in the church square or inside the church itself, as happened in 1870, to the lively disapproval of the Prefecture. The seventeenth-century sanctuary of the Madonna del Pilastro, on the other hand, took into its presbytery the real pillar, the one before which a deaf and dumb girl had seen the Madonna.