Poggio Rusco

Poggio Rusco sits at the south-eastern tip of the Oltrepò Mantovano, on the Modena border, and owes its name to the rise it grew on, sixteen metres above sea level: on average three to six metres higher than the valleys around, hence safer from the floods of the Po. The second name is recent. In 1867 the town council, pressed by the Interior Ministry to distinguish a Poggio found all over Italy, voted unanimously to add Rusco: the canal parting Mantuan land from Modenese, named for the butcher's broom, Ruscus aculeatus, growing along the irrigation ditches.

The arms, never granted by decree and used since at least the early nineteenth century, set a red tower with Ghibelline merlons beside a tree, on a green field crossed below by a blue stream bearing a boat under full sail: the Rusco canal and the Torre Falconiera, also called Colombara, the village symbol. Nobody knows when the tower went up; it likely served as a lookout towards the Duchy of Mirandola's border, or as a refuge in danger. Damaged by the Emilia earthquake of 2012 and restored, it reopened with an exhibition on country life. Arnoldo Mondadori was born here in 1889.