Terranova dei Passerini

Terranova dei Passerini has 906 inhabitants in the countryside of Lodi, an agricultural village that for centuries was called simply Terra Nuova. The longer name arrived in 1863, in honour of Rinaldo dei Bonacolsi, known as Passerino, little sparrow, for how thin he was: he was the last of his family to rule Mantua, and he held it until the night of 16 August 1328, when the Gonzaga came into the city with the soldiers of Cangrande della Scala and he bled to death from a wound to the head.

The story, however, goes on after his death, and becomes one of the strangest in Italy. Passerino's body was embalmed and ended up on show in the cabinet of curiosities of the Ducal Palace in Mantua, set astride a stuffed hippopotamus: a German traveller saw it and wrote about it in 1626. It was said that whoever got rid of it would lose power; the last duchess, tired of having that corpse in the house, had it thrown into the lake, and in 1708 the Gonzaga lost Mantua. The hippopotamus, on the other hand, still exists: taken to Pavia in 1783, it stands in the natural history museum of the university.