San Giacomo delle Segnate

On the arms of San Giacomo delle Segnate there is an oak planted between two watercourses, and beside the tree the initials S and B. The oak is the one that, according to a Lombard custom, was «marked» with a sign and so became the guardian of farming boundaries: from that practice the name of the village is said to come, le Segnate. The two letters are those of Saint Benedict of Nursia, because the first to drain these marshes and turn them into ploughland were the monks of the abbey of Polirone, under whose jurisdiction the manor of the Signada passed around the middle of the thirteenth century.

The village itself, though, is very young: Gonzaga land until 1707, after the plebiscite of 1866 it was no more than a frazione of Quistello, and it took the law of 10 August 1922 for the autonomous comune to be born in 1924, with a little over three thousand inhabitants, fewer than a thousand of them in the town centre and all the rest scattered across the countryside. The arms with the oak came later still, in 1954. In 2012 the Emilia earthquakes struck hard here, first on 20 and then on 29 May.