Borgo a Mozzano

On the Serchio, just outside the village, stands the Ponte della Maddalena, which everyone calls the Devil's Bridge: a very high, lopsided hump that tradition traces back to Matilda of Canossa and that Castruccio Castracani had restored. During the Second World War the territory of Borgo a Mozzano was crossed by the Gothic Line, and the Germans built imposing defensive works here — bunkers, tunnels and positions which in good part are still there and can be visited. At the Liberation, in 1945, reconstruction began: nearly all the bridges had been blown and had to be rebuilt. Nearly all, indeed: the Ponte della Maddalena was spared. The oldest and the most fragile-looking is the one that was not brought down.

The name of the village appears for the first time in a document of 879 as Mozanus, «in loco Mozzano prope Decimo», that is, near Diecimo, which lies a couple of kilometres away. From 925 there are the Suffredinghi, lords of many lands hereabouts; in 1272 the Republic of Lucca makes it the seat of a podesteria, and at the beginning of the sixteenth century the Borgo takes a decision for which historians are in its debt: it establishes that all the papers concerning it must be preserved — from which come the assessment of 1531 and the statute of 1539. The comune proper takes shape between 1615 and 1616, and in the Napoleonic reorganisation Borgo a Mozzano becomes the capital of the Apennine canton. The arms, granted in 2004, show a silver crenellated tower on a green hill, with two windows and a door out of which flows a winding river, the Serchio; the tower recalls the stronghold the Suffredinghi raised around the year one thousand. There is finally something that concerns the sky: in 1999 the amateur astronomer Sauro Donati discovered an asteroid, and that asteroid now bears the name of this village.