Boretto

For centuries Boretto had only one problem: it no longer wanted to be a hamlet of Brescello. In 1755, by then more populous and richer than Brescello itself, it bought communal autonomy from the duke of Modena by paying out two thousand Florentine zecchini — an enormous sum — and five years later decided to join up with Brescello again. Definitive emancipation came only in 1859, by decree of the dictator Farini. The name too speaks of how hard it was to stay there: it appears from the year 855 as Beruptum, Boruptum, Bisruptum, all ways of saying the constant breaches of the Po's banks; by another hypothesis it would come instead from Poreptum, «straight Po», for the straight stretch the river makes exactly here.

The river, after all, is everything. Between 1409 and 1479 Boretto was occupied by the Venetians, who controlled navigation on the Po from the mouth up to this point: ever since, the village has shared its patron saint with Venice, and beside the parish church, on a pillar, stands a lion of Saint Mark given by the Republic — the same lion that, with the red cross of Reggio, ended up on the communal arms. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the brigantine of the dukes of Modena was moored here, a little over eleven metres, a single mast, five oars a side and two small cannon. The pontoon bridge that led to Viadana, destroyed in 1967, can still be seen in the Don Camillo films, shot partly on this bank. And from Boretto comes Artemide Zatti, born in 1880, a Salesian, who died in 1951 at Viedma in Patagonia and was proclaimed a saint on 9 October 2022: down there they remember him every 15 March in front of the hospital that bears his name.