Luzzara

However you read the name, it means mud: from the Latin luteus, from the Celtic lossa, or from the Greek luma, filth. This is no coincidence, because the original settlement stood on an island in the middle of the Po. The oddity survives today on the map: right here the border between Emilia-Romagna and Lombardy stops following the Po and switches to the Zara, a tributary now reduced to a ditch, and it is that switch which creates the Oltrepò mantovano, a piece of Lombardy on the right bank. Almost a fifth of the municipal territory is floodplain, where building is forbidden.

On the fifteenth of August 1702, in the middle of the War of the Spanish Succession, a ferocious battle was fought here between the imperial army of prince Eugene of Savoy and the Franco-Spanish forces; two days later the town surrendered to the victors and paid dearly for it. Thirty-two years later, on the seventeenth of September 1734, they fought here again. Despite all this the town plan is still the one laid out by the Gonzaga in the fifteenth century, with the squares, the palaces of power and the churches in their places; and Luzzara is where Cesare Zavattini came from.