Casola in Lunigiana

The old name said which side of the ridge it lies on: Casoli d'oltregiogo, that is beyond the watershed dividing the Serchio valley from the Magra. The comune, for its part, was born, died and rose again in five years. It was created in 1812 by the French, who split the vicariate of Fivizzano into four; it ended in 1814, when the anti-French troops entered the village and the Restoration gave it back to Fivizzano; and it became a comune again on the fourteenth of December 1816, through the stubbornness of one man, the former mayor Ambrosio Ambrosi.

An account remained open: during the occupation Fivizzano had sold property belonging to Casola's hamlets, and the Grand Duke ruled that it must pay back more than ten thousand lire, reckoned down to the cent. The debt was settled in 1902, almost a century later. The tag in Lunigiana arrived in 1863, so as not to be confused with the other Casolas in Italy. And on the twenty-third of November 1944, with the Gothic Line close by, fifteen civilians were shot in a German round-up at the hamlet of Regnano.