Pontenure

The 45th parallel runs through this village, the line that lies exactly halfway between the equator and the north pole. The name is older and plainer: pontis and Nurae, the bridge over the Nure, because the place was put there to defend it. In the charters of the ninth century Pontenure is a fundus and a locus, which is to say very little; in the following century it is already a castrum, which means somebody had fortified it. Some think it may be the fortified emporium of Victumviae that Livy names near Piacenza, and that Hannibal tried to take with foot, horse and elephants.

A good deal then happened at that bridge. In 1117, with an emperor camped a short way off at Roncaglia, the men of Piacenza and of Parma fought a battle here. In the twelve hundreds the village was occupied and its castle pulled down along with others round about; a second castle was razed in 1337 by Azzone Visconti. In 1446 the condottiero Bartolomeo Colleoni was arrested near Pontenure by order of the duke of Milan, who suspected him of dealing with the enemy for whom he had just raised an army. The plague of 1630 killed about five hundred people here, buried near the Nure. In the seventeen hundreds two families, the Cigala Fulgosi and the Fantoni, took turns year by year in the jurisdiction of the place. And the bridge that gave the village its name was rebuilt in 1833, because the old one could no longer carry the traffic of the via Emilia.