Gattatico

Gattatico is a scattered comune: the municipal seat is not at Gattatico, which nevertheless gives its name to the whole, but at Praticello, the frazione that stands in the middle of the territory, and it was moved there in 1870; the statute even provides that in wholly exceptional cases the council may meet elsewhere. The recognised places are six, each with its own history. The first colonisation of this land, once covered with woods, was made by the Cenomani, who raised the fort of Taneto; then the Romans drained and divided the plain according to the centuriation, traces of which remain around Nocetolo — the present via Zappellazzo runs over the ancient via Tabularia, which linked the villages along the Po with the Reggio hills. The origin of the name is uncertain, but it may come from captato, prisoner, for the prisoners employed in the reclamation works. After the Carolingians the territory belonged for nearly two centuries to the bishops of Parma, then to lordships from Parma and to the Farnese; under Napoleon the duchy was divided into thirteen mairies, and the community of Gattatico had its first mayor, captain Luigi Nalli, on the twenty-fifth of March 1806. Between the end of the eighteen hundreds and the beginning of the nineteen hundreds two reformers worked here: the liberal deputy Ulisse Carmi, who founded a people's bank and a mutual aid society, and professor Amos Tragni, a pupil of Carducci, a socialist, who founded cooperatives and the people's library.

The seven Cervi brothers were born at Campegine, but from 1934 the family farmed here, in the Campi Rossi area, on a rented holding — which for the peasants of this plain meant working the land by the tenant's rules and not the master's. They read, they went on training courses, and in 1939 they bought a tractor. On the twenty-fifth of July 1943, when the radio gave the official news of Mussolini's arrest, the Cervi, anti-fascists from the beginning, celebrated by offering their fellow villagers macaroni with butter and Parmesan: with the famine of the war it was thought a great luxury. That pasta is still eaten here every year on the day of the anniversary. Their farmhouse became a refuge for anti-fascists, for wounded partisans and for foreign prisoners escaped from the camps — Soviets, South Africans, an Irishman. In the night between the twenty-fourth and the twenty-fifth of November 1943 a fascist round-up took them; on the twenty-seventh of December partisans killed the communal secretary of Bagnolo in Piano, and on the twenty-eighth the seven brothers were shot in reprisal at Reggio Emilia, together with Quarto Camurri. In a document of the fascist leadership recovered after the war, beside the bracket enclosing the seven names, somebody had written «sette fratelli?», seven brothers?, and underlined it in red. In October 1944 the fascists came back to set fire to the house, where two old people, four women and eleven children had stayed; a month later the mother, Genoeffa Cocconi, died of the consequences of the heart attack she had that day. Their father Alcide got out of prison during an Allied bombing, and when at last his sons' funeral could be held he said the sentence everybody here knows: after one harvest another one comes. The farmhouse today is a museum, Casa Cervi.