Casina

Casina became the chief place because a road went through it, not because it was the biggest village. The comune was born on 4 December 1859, by a decree of Luigi Carlo Farini, dictator of Emilia, and Casina was then a small borgo, a good deal smaller than other nearby villages that later became its hamlets; it was chosen because it stood at a junction, the military road from Gualtieri to Aulla, opened at the end of the eighteenth century. Before that the territory had never been one thing: in 1798 the French had shared it out among the cantons of Vezzano, Carpineti and Castelnovo ne' Monti. It lies wholly in the mountains, between the valley of the Crostolo to the east and that of the Tassobbio to the west, and counts some thirty scattered hamlets.

Beneath that recent geography there is a much older one. In 1872, with the digs of Gaetano Chierici, there came to light on top of Monte Venera, at the locality of Ariolo, a terramare village of the Bronze Age; a second ancient settlement, the Village of the Faieto, lies near the hamlet of Cortogno. In 628 the abbot Bertulf, returning from Rome, wrote that he had passed by the castrum Bismantum: the old Roman road between Lucca and Parma, which from the Pradarena pass reaches Bismantova, was then the only Apennine crossing wholly in Lombard hands. The gastaldate of Bismantova was divided into four curtis, and the territory of Casina fell to that of Malliaco, which today no longer exists. In 958 Adalbert Atto of Canossa bought six farms along the valley of the Tassobbio to secure himself a corridor as far as Bismantova; and in 1315 «Cassina» appears in the Book of Hearths of the comune of Reggio.