Bagnolo in Piano

The name comes from the Flumen Baniolus, one of the watercourses that crossed this plain when it was still the marshy depression of the Padusa. Medieval Bagnolo is born in 946, and it is born in a way that says a good deal about how things worked: the bishop of Reggio assigns the church of Santa Mustiola, which stood next to the castle, to paying for the lighting of the altar of the martyrs Grisante and Daria. A whole church endowed to keep one lamp burning. From 1335 the village belonged to the Gonzaga, and in 1354 Feltrino, whom the people detested, rebuilt the fortress with stones taken from buildings his own militia had knocked down.

That fortress is gone: it was destroyed by the French army of Louis XIV during the War of the Spanish Succession, in 1702, and all that survives is the tower, the Torrazzo. The perimeter of the vanished castle is now drawn on the ground in red paving, on the western side of piazza Garibaldi. Under that same tower, on the fourteenth of February 1945, the Black Brigade shot ten citizens of Bagnolo; three weeks later, at the cemetery of San Michele della Fossa, eight prisoners from the Reggio jail were executed in reprisal.