Caselle Landi

At Caselle they did not move the village: they moved the river. The settlement stood on the right bank of the Po, below Piacenza, and the floods threatened it constantly because there was no real embankment. So in 1590 the counts Cristoforo and Manfredino Landi, who had held the fief since 1262, decided to canalise the upper bend of the Po towards the south-east, so that the territory would find itself on the left bank. The works, to a design by the engineers Alessandro Bolzoni and Scipione Dattari, began in 1593; the dead branch of the river stayed a marsh until the nineteenth century. One portion of the territory, though, remained over there, between Piacenza and Caorso: the comune still stands on both banks.

Of the Landi's old castle a single tower is left, of the original four, and part of the façade; beside it is the new palace, which in the village they call the Palàsi, built in the seventeenth century by Felice Landi with the idea of giving it over to the Sacred Order of Malta — and it shows, because inside there are no state rooms or noble halls, while outside there is a cross on the flagstaff and a little chapel beside the entrance. On 1 April 1945, at the Punte Alte farm, the Black Brigades surrounded the Campagnoli house, where the son Silvano, a partisan, had come home for Easter: they killed him, his sixteen-year-old brother Lino, his father Pietro and his mother Teresa Berselli, who was pregnant. Then they also killed the sharecropper Luigi Losi, who had carried the children to safety in his trap and had come back to the farm to ask that the animals be spared.