Pegognaga

The town centre is cut across the north by the forty-fifth parallel, the line halfway between the North Pole and the Equator. The name, some say, comes from a Pecunius, a Roman patrician said to have founded a farming village here in the first century; another takes it from the Latin pecunia, money, for the yield of this land. The Roman village was called Flexum and the barbarian invasions destroyed it: it dropped out of history for a long time.

It reappears in 877 as corte Pigugnaria, a form that slides over the centuries into Pegognaga. Disputed between the communes of Reggio Emilia and Mantua, it was settled by an agreement signed here in 1257 placing it under the joint rule of both. The coat of arms tells the rest: a Doric capital dedicated Pado Patri, the Po as a bearded man pouring water from an amphora, a boat oar and two poplars.