Carpineti

The Prato di Carpineto is named already in 957, but the most interesting thing about this territory is that a border ran through it. Before the year one thousand there was Verabolo here, the seat of a Roman and then Byzantine pagus, and along the ridge between the mountains Valestra and Fosola there probably ran the limes between the lands of Byzantium and those of the Lombards. Of that border a trace has remained in something nobody would expect: the local church, organised around the old pieve of San Vitale, depended on the bishop of Ravenna and not on the one of Reggio. The hamlets, the churches and the tower houses scattered through the comune are all built with the same sandstone quarried here.

On the ridge stands the Romanesque castle, the residence Matilda of Canossa preferred, and from up there one sees together the valley of the Secchia and that of the Tresinaro. In 1092 what the chronicles call the meeting of Carpineti was held there: churchmen and allies of the countess discussed Henry IV's peace proposals, and Matilda — pushed also by the vehement words of the hermit Giovanni da Marola — decided not to treat and to go on with the war against the emperor, who shortly after was defeated and humiliated at Canossa, a few kilometres from here. When the countess died, Carpineti passed from lord to lord; in the thirteenth century it swore fealty to the Comune of Reggio, but with a fealty often doubtful. Of that impatience the memory of the brigand Domenico Amorotto remains, sworn enemy of Guicciardini and of the lords of Reggio, who for years ruled over these mountains. In the second world war the comune counted a hundred and six dead.