Toano

Toano was born around its pieve, and the pieve is older than the village. The first certain reference is in a deed of Berengar I, given at Pavia on 6 November 907, which names the Court of Toano; then, in a deed of Otto II of 980, the «Plebem de Toano» appears among the most important rural pievi of the time, and the pieve of Santa Maria is still there, one of the oldest in the whole diocese of Reggio, with around it the farm buildings that mark the place of the first village. After the last raids of the Hungarians, at the end of the ninth century, the ancient Thoanum defended itself by building fortifications around the church, and became a castle under Boniface, the father of Matilda of Canossa. In the thirteenth century it made itself a free comune, joining with Reggio, and in 1265 the men of Modena laid siege to it; in 1461 duke Borso d'Este gave it its own statutes, the Statuta potestariae Toani et Caulae.

The oldest thing in the comune, however, nobody has yet managed to explain. In 1996 at Toano a fossil of the Upper Cretaceous turned up, of about seventy million years, and about its origin very different guesses have been made: the filling of galleries dug by abyssal worms, the material expelled by those same creatures as they fed on the mud of the sea floor, or else the trace of a squid's tentacle later decomposed. The find is on show at the Civic Museums of Reggio Emilia. In 1944 the village paid dearly for the Resistance — the battle of Ca' Marastoni, the massacre of Manno, the burning of Toano — and it was part, with Villa Minozzo, Frassinoro, Polinago, Prignano and Montefiorino, of the partisan republic of Montefiorino, which lasted forty days. With Villa Minozzo, in 2013, a referendum asked whether to merge the two comuni: the noes won.