San Giovanni in Croce

In July 1492 Cecilia Gallerani became countess of San Giovanni in Croce. She is the woman Leonardo had painted with an ermine: here, married to Ludovico Carminati, she wrote verse in Latin and the vernacular, was a friend of Gian Giorgio Trissino and Matteo Bandello and kept a small court of artists. Her house was the villa Medici del Vascello, which the comune bought in 2005 and reopened to the public in 2014 after restoration; the municipal theatre bears her name.

The oldest nucleus of the village, though, was called Palvareto — from palus and vetus, the old marsh — and appears in a deed of 10 December 1022. There was a castle here, which in 1406 Cabrino Fondulo destroyed in order to have a bigger one built at once. And the old name has come back twice: between 1928 and 1947, when San Giovanni was united with Solarolo Rainerio in the comune of Palvareto, and in 2010, when four comuni of the area called their union Palvareta Nova.