Crema

Crema was born of a flight, and bears the name of the men who led it. Tradition says that on the fifteenth of August 570, with the Lombards coming, the people of the area took refuge on the highest part of the island of the Mosa and put it in a state of defence: first under one Cremete, count of Palazzo, then under Fulcherio. From those two names come Crema and the Insula Fulcheria, which is what the district is called. In 1159 the city, allied with Milan against Ghibelline Cremona, was besieged and destroyed by Frederick Barbarossa, and of that siege the people of Crema remember one thing exactly: the Germans tied some prisoners to their siege engines, hoping the walls would not fire. It did not work, and it turned into a slaughter. The council chamber of the town hall is still called the hall of the Cremasque Hostages, and there is a street named for them too.

From 1449 Crema belonged to Venice, the only Venetian city in mainland Lombardy, and stayed so for three and a half centuries: it won privileges, kept its autonomy and — while the duchy of Milan grew poor under the Spanish — it built. From that time are the new walls, the town hall and the palazzo della Notaria. The cathedral in Lombard Gothic brick is older; outside the gate stands the Bramantesque sanctuary of Santa Maria della Croce, raised where tradition places the apparition of the Virgin to Caterina degli Uberti, which the town commemorates every third of April. The world, later, discovered Crema through «Call Me by Your Name», shot among these squares and this countryside. But the little capital was all there already, with its arcades, its bicycles and its irrigation channels all round; and there is the tortello cremasco, sweet and spiced, with amaretti and raisins: a declaration of identity that divides and conquers.