Pieve San Giacomo

At Pieve San Giacomo they made chandeliers for Murano. The young craftsman Giuseppe Borghisani, having taken his diploma as a mechanical technician, began designing them here for the glassworks of the lagoon, and his works can still be seen in Monte Carlo, Paris and London: the glass came from Venice, the design and the metal from the Cremona plain. In the twentieth century the village also had the Manfredi firm, which worked more than twenty-five thousand square metres of wood a year and was among the world leaders in wood panelling; it closed in 1994, after the workers had occupied the town hall the year before. At Gazzo, since the post-war years, there is the Auricchio dairy instead, which processes two thousand quintals of milk a day, mostly into provolone.

The name comes from two saints and a countess. The patron is Saint Babila, the bishop who, according to the accounts gathered by the historian don Angelo Grandi, was beheaded on the via Postumia itself, the road that passed through here; the parish church, on the other hand, was dedicated to Saint James the Apostle in the eleventh century by Matilda of Canossa, who was particularly devoted to that saint. There was then a Benedictine monastery in the village, inhabited by monks until the seventeenth century: two tombs with the remains of two friars, found in 1963, confirm it.