Casale Monferrato

In the arms of Casale there is a gold cross on red with four Greek B's in the corners: it is the insignia of the emperors of Constantinople. It is not an affectation. At the start of the fourteenth century, to have done with the feuding between families, the town called in as peacemaker Theodore Palaiologos, son of the Byzantine emperor Andronikos II and of Violante of Monferrato, and swore fealty to him: from then on Monferrato had marquises of imperial blood, and in 1434 Casale became their capital. The town's name appears for the first time in a donation by the deacon Andrea to the canonry of Sant'Evasio, on the fifteenth of August 988; in 1215 Milan, Vercelli, Asti and Alessandria came to an agreement and razed it, and Casale rebuilt itself quickly. With the Gonzaga came the citadel, one of the most powerful in Europe; but the Gonzaga did something else as well, and allowed the Jews of Monferrato to practise their religion freely. That is why on the first floor of a courtyard stands the synagogue of 1595, among the most sumptuous in Europe, which not even the Napoleonic age stopped enriching; in its atrium a memorial recalls the fifty-nine Jews of Casale deported and killed in the death camps.

Then Casale became the town of cement: in the Robatti works, of which the Paraboloide remains, the first industrial production of natural Portland cement in Italy was made, and the marl came from mines in the surrounding hills on a narrow-gauge railway. From that same industry came the heaviest bill in its history: the Eternit plant, which worked asbestos before its toxicity was known, has caused since the fifties more than one thousand six hundred deaths among workers and townspeople, from a disease of the lungs that can be treated but not cured, and that has kept appearing for decades. For the rest there remain the Romanesque cathedral of Sant'Evasio with its narthex unique of its kind, the castle of the Palaiologoi, the sixty-metre civic tower with the Gonzaga weathervane on top, and the frescoed palaces. On the Po they live on rice and wine — the Grignolino has its homeland here — and on krumiri, the moustache-shaped biscuits. The vineyard Monferrato of the world heritage list begins just outside the gate.