Magnacavallo

The name of Magnacavallo has more than one explanation. The driest derives it from magna cava in vallo, the big quarry in the valley. The finest is a popular tradition: Guerrino, the knight of Andrea da Barberino's Guerrin Meschino, having dismounted to rest in the shade of a tree, is said to have told his steed «Magna caual, che l'erba la cress!» — eat, horse, the grass is growing — and the place of that halt is still called Prà Guerin. Others bring in the noble Magnocavalli family of Nizza Monferrato, without finding an archive paper to prove it. The first written record is of 1575, in the marriage book of the parish of Poggio; and between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries the village was also called «Comunità de Boschi», the community of the woods, because it had plenty of them.

Then come the numbers that hurt. In the single year 1630, between the war of succession of the Duchy of Mantua and the plague that followed it, 442 deaths were recorded at Magnacavallo, out of a population estimated at between five and six hundred people. And on 3 June 1852 four young men of the village, draft evaders from the Austrian army who had turned to brigandage, were tried at Este and brought back here to be shot in public, so that people would see. Many, later, left: in the square by the town hall stands the Monument to the Emigrant, unveiled in 1990, and a small museum gathers documents and photographs of those who went, mostly to Brazil.