Commessaggio

At Commessaggio the protagonist is the canal. It crosses the built-up area, marks the boundary with Sabbioneta, and for centuries had no name but that of the village: in the nineteenth-century land registers it is the Scolo Commessaggio, but the first document to name it dates from 1033 and already speaks of a flumen Commessadii. All these channels are the legacy of the draining of an old marsh, the Regona, which filled with the floods of the Po and had been inhabited since at least the Bronze Age. The canal was also bread: its abundance of fish sustained the village for centuries and until a few decades ago drew fishermen from the neighbouring provinces.

In 1565 Vespasiano Gonzaga Colonna, young marquis of Sabbioneta, took Commessaggio by force, closing in his own favour a dispute with his cousins of San Martino dall'Argine, who were its lawful owners. From him come the present shape of the village, the bridge and the Torrazzo tower. When he died, in 1591, he left his daughter Isabella as heir, whom the duke of Mantua at once declared incapable of governing because she was a woman; the agreement signed on 6 March that year laid down that the canal should divide the two territories and that the whole watercourse, with its fish ponds, belonged to Commessaggio. Of the entire inheritance, the thing everyone wanted was the water.