Vezzano sul Crostolo

The village stands on the left bank of the Crostolo, in the first line of hills above Reggio, and for centuries it lived on something you quarry: gypsum, dug in the pits near the houses. The name appears for the first time in a donation of 835, made by Cunegonda of Laon, widow of king Bernard of Italy, to the monastery of Sant'Alessandro in Parma; a second document, from the monastery of San Prospero in Reggio, attests it in 1097. In 1188 the men of the place swore fealty to the Comune of Reggio, and renewed the oath nine years later. With the Restoration the territory was broken up and divided among Reggio, Scandiano and San Polo; in those same years the Cerreto road, which used to follow the course of the Campola, was straightened and made to pass through here, along the valley of the Crostolo. The comune as it stands was set up in 1859 by Luigi Carlo Farini.

Of the twentieth century two dates remain. On 24 June 1944, in the hamlet of La Bettola, the nazifascists killed thirty-two civilians: it is one of the gravest massacres of the Reggio country. And in August 1970, in the hamlet of Pecorile, there was held — according to what Renato Curcio and Alberto Franceschini have recounted — a meeting of about a hundred delegates of the Milanese organisation Sinistra Proletaria, in the course of which the birth of the Red Brigades is said to have been decided. The churches, instead, are older than all the rest: San Martino, attested in 1156 and consecrated by bishop Adalberio, was rebuilt in its present forms in 1823; Santa Eufemia of Casola Canossa is cited in an eleventh-century document; and at Pecorile there is the Matildic church of Sant'Eufemia, which carries the name of the countess who commanded these valleys.