San Daniele Po

The history of this village on the left bank of the Po can be read in its street names. Around 1800 Napoleon enlarged the comune by adding to it countryside that until then had been Parma's, and the centre was via Cantone: about ten farmsteads and a hundred people. The good years were those between 1850 and 1900, when the first factory opened, the Galletti vinegar works, the oldest in Italy, of 1871; with the factory came via Faverzani, which linked the old centre to the first villages of the Casalasco. The landowners were against it, because they saw hectares of field disappear: today that street is the centre of the village. Another was called via Po because it led to the embankment, and on 25 April 1945 it became via XXV Aprile, because the casa del popolo stood there, the meeting point of the local partisan units. In 1951 the river overflowed and brought to their knees the farms out on the flood plain: via Dondi was opened in 1952 precisely so that those who lived outside could move behind the main embankment.

The Po, which has conditioned everything, also gives bones back: the Museo Paleoantropologico del Po keeps the fossils the current brings ashore, and on the west side of the building there is a giant mural painted by the street artist Ericailcane for the museum's twentieth anniversary, in May 2018. Long before, around the year one thousand, it had been the Benedictines of the monastery of Parma who reclaimed this land; in those years the Sommi settled on the bank, a noble family come from Cremona, and from them comes the name of the frazione Sommo con Porto, the only inheritance left: the house was cut down in 1647, when the Gallo-Estense troops sacked Cremona. Their small shield is still in the town's coat of arms, held by the lion of Saint Daniel, above a wavy band that is the course of the river.