Fosdinovo

The village enters written history on 22 March 1084, in a deed of donation kept in the Chapter Archive of Lucca, and it enters sideways: not because anything happens here, but because the notary who writes the deed comes from here, from «Fosdenova». For two centuries the documents alternate that name with Faucenova, from faux nova, new mouth, and the explanation lies in the geography: from here a new passage opened from the sea towards inner Lunigiana and the Apennines. Then, in 1324, the form Fosdenovum appears, which comes instead from the Latin fodio, to dig, that is from the ditch, the fosso — and the Fosso is still today the square where the village gathers, and since the eighteenth century its sports ground as well. In passing from one form to another the name also changed gender, from feminine to masculine.

Real fortune came with the Malaspina dello Spino Fiorito, imperial vicars in Italy, who held here the capital of an independent marquisate between the fourteenth and the eighteenth century. The village came through the Tuscan wars of the sixteenth century almost untouched and grew so rich that in 1666 the Holy Roman Empire authorised it to strike its own coin: in the whole area only Massa and Tresana had the like. In the same year Pasquale Malaspina paid for the white marble front of the oratory of the Fellowship of the Whites. When the Napoleonic occupation ended, the congress of Vienna took Fosdinovo from the Malaspina and gave it to the duchy of Massa, then to the Este of Modena, who made it the capital of ducal Lunigiana; since 1859 it has been Italian. In the countryside around, the war ended with the roundups of November 1944 and the last bombardments of 23 April 1945.