Rovescala has 917 inhabitants on the hills of the Oltrepò, on the border with the Piacenza province, and it has a name that is already a trade: it comes from the Latin robur, the oak, and the Germanic scalen, to strip bark — because here the bark was stripped from the oaks to get the tannin that was needed for tanning leather. On the coat of arms there is a lion with its claws on a trunk, doing exactly that. The village was given in 943 by the kings of Italy Hugh and Lothair to the bishop of Pavia.
The counts of Rovescala, Guelphs and declared enemies of the Visconti, held half the Oltrepò in their hands for two centuries, until in 1416 Filippo Maria Visconti marched against them, took the castle and threw them into prison. In 1482 the duchy sold the lordship for three hundred ducats to a nobleman from Piacenza, the Pecorara. But the counts were still the biggest landowners in the place, and out of that came a war of papers and knives that lasted a century and a half, closed only in the sixteenth century — not by a verdict, but by a series of marriages between the two families.
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Near Rovescala
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
