Rolo

Rolo was one of the longest-lived imperial fiefs in Italy. The Sessi, a Ghibelline branch of a family from Reggio, seized it a first time in 1153, and in 1304 they were enfeoffed directly by the emperor: from then on this small piece of plain depended on imperial authority alone and never became part of the Po lordships that surrounded it. The neighbouring lords tried more than once to take it and never managed, thanks to the political skill of the Sessi and because it suited the emperor to have, in case of war, a small state of his own right on that border. The thing ended in 1776, when marquis Gaetano Sessi died without male heirs: the territory passed to the Austrian administration of Maria Theresa, which had the walls pulled down, reduced the castle to a single building turned into a workshop and made the Italian garden into an orchard.

Of that fief a curious right has remained. In 1446 the brothers Azzo and Giacomo Sessi obtained from the bishop of Reggio the giuspatronato, that is the hereditary right to appoint the archpriests of the pieve of Rolo; the last feudal lord left it by will to the community, and since then it is the town council that exercises it, today only formally. The last archpriest appointed by the council, after examining several candidacies, was don Umberto Borghi, in 1965. The name of the village is older still: Ariolas appears in a Lombard diploma of 772 and comes from areola, «small area», probably a cultivated space in the middle of the woods; in 902 a notarial charter names a Vico Rolesa. One last displacement came in 1850, when Rolo passed from Lombardy-Venetia to the duchy of Modena in exchange for the border being drawn back to the current of the Po: the ties with Mantua were broken, and the parish stayed under the bishop of Mantua until 1872.