Fusignano

On the evening of the second of April 1632 the Corelli tried to kill the marquis Mario Calcagnini, who held the fief of Fusignano. The ambush failed, and the reprisal knew no measure: the head of the family, Rodolfo Corelli, was beheaded and then quartered, the family palace was pulled down, the ground ploughed and sown with salt to everlasting infamy. That patch of land was called for a century the Spianata dei Corelli, and nobody built anything on it. The marquis, for his part, left Fusignano two years later all the same, exchanging it for the fief of Formigine to his cousins' advantage. Twenty-one years after the ambush Arcangelo Corelli was born in the town. And it was the Corelli who, in 1753, gave that salted ground to the parish so that a church might be built on it: inside they had a chapel made for their own family and one for the Calcagnini, side by side, to say that it was over.

The town, after all, was born of a disaster. In the middle of the thirteenth century a flood of the Senio submerged some villages south of Lugo belonging to the counts of Cunio, and the people were left without houses; in 1257 the counts moved them twelve kilometres north, onto land bought for the purpose, and built a castrum there. Fusignano is that: a place made for those who had lost their own. Water counted again in the twentieth century, but as a front line. First, though, came politics: on the twelfth of January 1923 the fascists killed Battista Emaldi, the socialist mayor of the years after the First World War. Then the Allied advance halted four months on the Senio, the Calcagnini castle was destroyed by bombing in 1944, and on the twenty-third of April that year, at the Palazzone, more than a hundred fascists and Germans killed eleven people among partisans and sharecroppers. The town was liberated in April 1945.