Casteldidone

The church of Santi Abdon e Sennen was consecrated on the twenty-fifth of October 1891 by the bishop of Cremona, Geremia Bonomelli, and by then fifty-five years had passed since the building work ended, in 1837: the village waited more than half a century to have its new church blessed. It stands on the site of the old one, which in its turn had been built over a sedimentation of ruins of the old castle of Didone — a real hillock of debris roughly levelled off — so much so that the archive papers show the earlier church standing a good three metres above the level of the road. That one had been built in 1433 and was surrounded on every side by the graveyard. The castle, for its part, had been destroyed by Fondulo in July of 1416 and restored after the sack of 1648. The village, in short, stands literally on the remains of the thing that gives it its name.

North of the built-up area, isolated in the middle of the fields on the road that links San Giovanni in Croce to Rivarolo Mantovano, stands Palazzo Mina Della Scala, which everyone here calls the castle. The first complex was raised by the local feudatory at the end of the fifteen hundreds, from 1595 on, and it is a singular example of a residenza castellata, that is a fortified villa. At the ends of the southern front rise two high towers, and each has three projecting sentry boxes at its corners, halfway up, plainly meant for watching the countryside and above all the entrance court; set against them, two service turrets hold the staircases and rise higher than the towers themselves. Carlo Perogalli called the arrangement explicitly neo-castellan, and gave two explanations for it: either it recalled a fortress that had stood there before, as the place name would suggest, or — more prosaically — the owners feared the destruction of war, which had already reached the house once, and did not want to be caught unprepared. The first complex had indeed suffered serious war damage and was rebuilt by the founders' nephew.