Campagnola Emilia

The name of this village is a compliment. Its oldest form, Campanìola, appears in a document of 772 and comes from the Latin campània, which the Roman land surveyors used for a country place, level ground; the suffix -iola is both a diminutive and an endearment, so Campaniola means «small and beautiful countryside»: cultivated, fertile land, not very extensive, an agricultural oasis in the middle of woods and marshes. The toponym, in short, marked a happy place emerging from the angustiae paludis et silvarum, the unfavourable zones that at the end of the first century before Christ were still to be met below the via Emilia. The other names of the territory tell of the Roman land too, each in its own way: Cognento, named in 935 as Quignente, comes from the numeral quingentum, five hundred, and indicated the extent of the place, five hundred iugera — and since a document of 1141 says the borgo was already divided into Cognento di sotto and Cognento di sopra, as it still is, one must think it was five hundred iugera each; Ponte Vettigano appears in the same document as Viticanum, from the Latin vitis, because the vine grew well there; and Garfagnana, in dialect Grafagna, would be the Latin personal name Cafranius with the r shifted about, almost certainly the name of a Roman farm that had taken its owner's.

In 935, to defend the farming court that was already there, a castle was built; in the twelfth century the castle and the territory were among the possessions of Matilda of Canossa, and after the end of the Canossa dominion they passed to the da Correggio. In 1371 Bernabò Visconti destroyed the castle, during the conflicts between the Visconti and the da Correggio, and for the village a long crisis began, of half-abandonment, which lasted until the fifteen hundreds. The recovery came with the draining of the marshes, and its most visible sign is the square: born as piazza Siro, it was conceived, designed and built as a single whole in the second half of the sixteen hundreds by the will of prince Siro of Correggio, together with the borgo of the porticoes, the villa and the church; the first paving is of 1621, the year in which the prince, by providing the material to build the square, in effect gave life to the comune. In 1633 the Empire accused the da Correggio of minting false money: Campagnola was confiscated by the Spanish and ceded to the Este. And the second name is the work of a pen: by the decree of the fourth of December 1859 the village regained its autonomy as the comune of Campagnola, and in the copy of the decree somebody added «Emilia».