Castelnovo di Sotto

In the municipal arms, recognised by decree only in 1967, there is an eagle that had in fact been in use for centuries, and about that eagle two irreconcilable explanations exist. Tradition traces it to a grant of the emperor Frederick the Second and to the time of the princes Da Correggio, imperial feudatories who bore the eagle of the empire in the chief of their coat; another version holds it to be nothing but the Napoleonic eagle imposed on many communities during French rule. Either an ancient privilege, or the mark of whoever had just arrived. The name, on the other hand, says exactly what the place was: the first document is a sale drawn up in Castronovum in 980, and by the thirteenth century the fort had become a stronghold of some weight, disputed for centuries above all between the Da Correggio and the Este.

That stronghold is still standing, and the end of its story is an unusual one. In the eighteenth century the marquis Gherardini turned it into a civil residence and surrounded it with a park designed by Geminiano Macagni; in 1869 it passed to the Chioffi family, and in 1903 it became the seat of the town council, so that in 1910 the council chamber was given over to be painted by Radames Dossi. The council, in short, sits inside the castle that gives the town its name. From the hamlet of Meletole came Luigi Melegari, co-founder of the Giovine Italia and later foreign minister, and the local carnival is among the oldest in Italy: its origins go back to the sixteenth century.