Motta Baluffi

In the Cremona dialect the village is simply called La Mòta, and its coat of arms says in two signs everything there is to know: a blue chevron, standing for the bend of the Po, and ears of wheat, standing for the fertility of the soil the river waters. It is the exact portrait of this piece of plain, where good land is a gift of the water and the water takes it back whenever it likes. Motta Baluffi lies in the Casalasco, the strip of the province of Cremona that runs along the Po, in an alluvial plain of very low gradient: it is precisely in conditions like these that a river begins to wander, to form meanders and to change its course.

When the main bed shifts, the meander left behind becomes a lanca: a dead bend, usually crescent-shaped, with still water. The lanche of the Po are wetlands of great interest, because in the thick vegetation of those standing pools a rich birdlife finds refuge and the fish grow in abundance; but they are also fragile places, because still water can run out of oxygen and cause mass die-offs. One of these abandoned bends gives its name to the nature reserve of the Lanca di Gerole, in this stretch of flood plain. The village has always lived on what the river allows it: the fields of the plain, and the memory of the times when the Po took them back.