Poviglio

The arms of Poviglio have two putti in them, and those two putti are an explanation of the name. The village appears in early medieval documents as Pupilium — so, in 1005, among the episcopal churches of the diocese of Parma — and in 1022 in the forms Pupilli and Pupilii; from there came the legend that it was founded by two «pupilii», that is two orphan children, and into the arms they duly went. Putting the documents and the digs together, though, the first settlement is of the ninth or tenth century. Poviglio then became a castle and in time a stronghold: seventeenth-century sources describe it as a star-shaped polygon with bastions jutting towards the countryside, because it was the only borgo of the duchy of Parma and Piacenza on the road that joined Reggio Emilia to Brescello, both of them Este towns.

Of that fortress nothing is left: walls and moats were dismantled from the beginning of the eighteenth century, and the perimeter can be made out only in the layout of today's streets, or from above by remote sensing. The village then passed to the duchy of Modena and Reggio and in 1860 to the Kingdom of Italy. Another buried settlement, on the other hand, has been brought out: in the hamlet of Fodico lies the terramara of Santa Rosa, seven hectares, dug by the University of Milan since 1983, which has yielded great hydraulic works of the Bronze Age; the four thousand square metres of ancient surface laid bare make it the largest excavation of its kind in Europe. And there is something you would not expect from a village of the plain: since the early eighties Poviglio has had a tradition of underground music, with the Raw Power of the Codeluppi brothers and a long line of hardcore bands after them.