Cella Dati

Until 1863 this village of the Cremona plain was called simply Cella. Then, like many comuni in those years, it added a second word in order to be told apart — but it did not take the name of a river or of a province: it took the surname of a family, and became Cella Dati. The bond did not stop at the name. The villa the Dati had built for themselves at the end of the seventeenth century is today the property of the comune and is the seat of the town hall: the village, that is, governs itself inside the house of the family it is named after. The villa can be visited thanks to the Fondo per l'Ambiente Italiano.

The communal arms too are a joining of families: on one side there is the crowned eagle of the Dati of Cremona, on the other the ox head of the Barbò, who had owned that same villa before them. Two coats of arms on a single shield, in the order in which they held the keys of the same building; the gonfalon is party of yellow and red. For the rest Cella Dati is a small comune of the plain between Cremona and the Po, with its parish church dedicated to Santa Maria Assunta and the fields all around. Its most modern chapter, though, closed long ago: between 1888 and 1954 the village had a station on the tramway linking Cremona to Casalmaggiore, run in its last years by the Tramvie Provinciali Cremonesi. When the tramway was suppressed, Cella Dati went back to being a place one reaches by road.