Vigolzone

The name, by an old explanation, would be Vicus Ulzionis, the village of vengeance: at the place called Sant'Angelo, Hannibal is said to have finally scattered the Roman centuries after his victory on the Trebbia, in two hundred and eighteen before Christ, and from that the name would come. In the charters the village appears in 830, as Vicus Ussoni. The first castle was begun in 1095 by Lantelmo Confalonieri, captain of the Piacenza militias in the Holy Land, as soon as he had been invested as the bishop's vassal; in 1242 king Enzo took and destroyed it, and of that one only the stump of a tower remains. The castle one sees today is of the fourteenth century, made by the nobleman Bernardo Anguissola, and it has a rectangular base and a tower forty metres high: it was taken by Ludovico il Moro in 1483 and, in 1521, by the French dragoons of general Lautrec.

The most curious thing in the comune, though, is a medieval borgo that is not medieval. In 1395 the duke of Milan Gian Galeazzo Visconti allowed his sister Beatrice, wife of the Piacenza nobleman Giovanni Anguissola, to build herself a manor: it is the castle of Grazzano, which stayed with the Anguissola until the eighteen seventies and then passed to the Visconti di Modrone. At the beginning of the twentieth century count Giuseppe Visconti di Modrone, father of the film director Luchino, had it restored and around it had an entire fortified borgo built from nothing in neo-medieval style, designed by the architect Alfredo Campanini. From here also comes the shape of the tortelli of Piacenza: tradition has it that, during a visit of Petrarch to his friend Bernardone Anguissola, the steward of the house called the round ones «traces left by a flock of sheep» and asked for something more elegant; the cooks invented the braided tail.