Campegine

Campegine became a comune in the Napoleonic age, in 1802, when the reorganisation of the municipalities served to take power away from the feudal lords: it had almost three thousand inhabitants and ended up in the third class, and the first «mayor», Luigi Cocconi, could only oversee the collection of taxes and ask for the odd piece of maintenance. Once the Napoleonic republics were over, the village was reabsorbed: in 1814 annexed to Sant'Ilario, in 1827 to Castelnovo di Sotto, and there it stayed until unification; independence returned in February 1860, with Farini's decree. Shortly afterwards came the milling tax, paid by weighing the harvest: the millers went to protest in front of the town hall and eight of them fell under the fire of the grenadiers sent to protect the mayor. The main square of the village is still called Ai Caduti del Macinato, to the fallen of the milling tax.

From then on Campegine went on saying no. At the beginning of the twentieth century the socialists governed the comune almost always unanimously, so much so that the village earned the nickname «little Russia»; in 1914 the council led by the socialist mayor Mauro Rapacchi took the neutralist side, because the people, who worked the land, knew that war would take arms away from the fields. And from here come the seven Cervi brothers — Agostino, Aldo, Antenore, Ettore, Ferdinando, Gelindo and Ovidio — farmers who from September 1943 joined the Resistance and helped Soviet and British soldiers to escape, among them Anatoly Tarasov, who later wrote a book about them. They were shot by the repubblichini at the shooting range of Reggio Emilia on 28 December 1943. In the two years that followed, in this area, partisan activity grew all the same.