Novellara

Novellara has 13,455 inhabitants in the Po plain, and looks like an ordinary farming town of the lowlands; for more than three centuries, though, it was a state. In 1371 Feltrino Gonzaga, defeated and forced to sell Reggio to the Milanese, reserved for himself and his family the fiefs of Novellara and Bagnolo: out of that came the county of Novellara, an independent statelet held together by the diplomacy and the arms of the Gonzaga until 1728, when the last count died. How independent it was is told better than by any chronicle by two rights it possessed: to keep its own executioner and to strike its own coin.

In 1600 the countess Vittoria da Capua, wife of Alfonso Gonzaga, went to Rome for the Jubilee, partly to pray and partly to mend the relationship with the Church, which was sliding towards excommunication. She came back with an apostolic blessing, and in 1603 the relics of seven patron saints arrived at Novellara, each in its own urn with its own bull. The town still carries them in procession through the streets, and has always called the rite "the procession of the seven little boxes". There are two other things to know: the painter and architect Lelio Orsi worked here, and his tombstone in Santo Stefano says of him that he was great in architecture, greater in painting and best of all in drawing; and every February thousands of people arrive by coach from all over Italy for Augusto Daolio, the singer who founded the Nomadi, who was born here and is buried here.