Cadelbosco di Sopra

The first name said what people ate here: Vicozoaro, from vicus, village, and from the zea, the spelt that bread was made of at the time, in a place where it grew in plenty. The village appears in a deed of donation drawn up by the notary Guidone in the castle on the sixth of April 1032. Towards the end of the fourteenth century, for reasons nobody wrote down, its people moved east among the woods, and by the middle of the following century the name Vicozoaro has vanished from the papers, replaced by Cadelbosco, «the houses of the wood».

This countryside was made, not found. The Benedictines, with the local laity, cleared the thick woodland, broke the ground and levelled the fields until the land turned fertile and gave pulses, millet, barley, vines and fruit trees. The comune itself came and went: in 1802, under the Italian Republic presided over by Bonaparte, Cadelbosco was raised to a comune, and after the Congress of Vienna duke Francesco IV restored the old order and demoted it to a mere frazione of Reggio.