Corte de' Cortesi con Cignone

The coat of arms of this village tells, without meaning to, a piece of Italian history. On the eleventh of October 1930 the podestà Giovanni Benedini sent the papers to the Head of Government so that the municipality might have one, and the grant came by royal decree on 21 June 1934: a gold dragon on a green ground, with an indented band of blue and silver cutting the field diagonally. The blazon, however, ended with three words that date the document better than any calendar: capo del Littorio, the chief bearing the lictor's fasces that the regime had added to civic arms. Today that chief is gone, and the municipality uses a different version: the difference between the two drawings is the whole story.

The double name, on the other hand, comes from an addition of 1867, when the municipality of Cignone was suppressed and joined to Corte de' Cortesi, which has carried both names ever since. This is the Cremona plain, flat country of farmsteads and cowsheds, and the parish church is dedicated to saints James and Philip. There is one figure, in this village of little more than a thousand people, that almost nobody would expect: at the last detailed count nearly one resident in six was Indian, by far the largest foreign community, ahead of the Moroccan, Romanian and Chinese ones.