Montecchio Emilia

The name is Monticulum, the little mount: the rises the town stands on are fill left by the floods of the Enza, and people built up there because the water did not reach them and the alluvial soil was fertile. In May 2012, in the Cava Spalletti, a gold cup of the eighteenth or seventeenth century before Christ came out of the ground, half a kilo of gold, buried and crushed as part of a rite nobody has been able to explain; it is now in the archaeological museum of Parma. The place appears in an imperial privilege of 781, the castle in a diploma of Matilda of Canossa of 1116.

Its position — halfway between Parma and Reggio, at a crossing of roads — kept it contended for centuries: the Church, the Visconti, the Barbiano, the Sforza, the Gonzaga, the Farnese, the Spanish, the French and finally the Este. Alfonso d'Este was lord here from 1533, and in 1562 the emperor Ferdinand I raised the fief to a marquisate with the right to strike coin, confirmed by Maximilian II in 1570. The Emilia was added in 1859 by a decree of the dictator Farini, to tell the town apart from the other Montecchios, on the very day its first town council met. Between 1909 and 1955 it was the terminus of a branch line, and the old station building still stands beside the road to Reggio.