Pescarolo ed Uniti

On the arms of Pescarolo there is a magic square. It is the Sator square, the Latin inscription that reads the same in every direction, and it is there because it appears in mosaic in the church of the hamlet of Pieve Terzagni. Beside it are two moorhens in the act of fishing — they recall the old name, Piscarolo — and a tower, which recalls the castle that gives the other hamlet, Castelnuovo del Vescovo, its name. The three figures are the three comuni that in 1867 were put together into one.

There were plenty of castles in these parts: the whole right bank of the Oglio was full of them, because the river was navigable and served as the border between the Duchy of Milan, the Republic of Venice and the Duchy of Mantua. Of Pescarolo's nothing remains: it was set on fire in the mid-seventeenth century by French, Piedmontese and Este troops, and in the eighteenth the Austrian government ordered what was left of it demolished. Before that there had been the Romans: at Castelnuovo a hoard of 450 coins came to light, and the sanctuary of Santa Maria alla Senigola stands on the remains of a country villa. Today's parish church, on the other hand, is of the twentieth century, built after a fire had destroyed the previous one in 1908.