Villa Minozzo

The territory of Villa Minozzo is the third largest in the province and climbs from the three hundred and fifty metres of the Secchia valley floor to the two thousand one hundred and twenty-one of monte Cusna, the highest peak of the Reggio country; it lies almost entirely inside the national park of the Tuscan-Emilian Apennines and has been a UNESCO biosphere reserve since 2015. The first mention of the place is probably in a diploma of Otto I of 963, which confirms to the Church of Reggio the cortem de' Melocio: the name Minozzo comes in all probability from that very rocca del Melocio. The word «Villa» was officially joined to the community only in 1615, when the inhabitants were a hundred and thirty-seven; the market had been moved up here twenty-five years earlier, because of the position's convenience for trade. Villa Minozzo became the definitive seat of the comune in 1815.

The most curious thing, though, is which side it was on. In 1070 bishop Gandolfo of Reggio reconfirmed a series of goods to Beatrice and Matilda of Canossa, but at Minozzo he kept his own soldiers as a garrison. That bishop went on to become one of the countess's fiercest enemies: he sided with the emperor, took part in the election of antipope Clement III and was beaten by Matilda at the battle of Sorbara, in 1084. In 1092 Minozzo appears in a document of that very antipope, who exercised jurisdiction only over territories of proven imperial loyalty: it was, in short, an island of the empire in the middle of Matilda's dominions, behind the castles of Canossa and Carpineti. The Ghibelline crenellation on the arms says the same, showing the stronghold of Minozzo; and the statute of the castellany opened by recalling, with a certain pride, that «the men of the castellany of Minozzo belong to the bishop of Reggio». Reggio finished subduing these mountains in 1268.