Isola Rizza

The old name was Insula Porcaritia: insula because the settlement stood on a clearing outside the woods and marshes, porcaritia because pigs were bred here and the place was, literally, the pig-pen. In time it became Porcarizza, and in 1872 the inhabitants decided it sounded almost vulgar and shortened it to Isola Rizza. The remarkable thing is that they then half changed their minds: in 1932 the comune adopted a coat of arms that took back the community's old emblem — the one reproduced at the foot of the parish bell tower since 1535 — which is to say the sow itself. Only, into the animal's mouth they put rice, the chief agricultural product of the area, which came here through the intervention of the Serenissima. The syllable they were ashamed of has stayed where it was, and now it means something else.

In February of that same 1872, ploughing a field called the sheep patch at Casalati, Giuseppe Faccini found under a stone slab a silver dish with a central embossed medallion showing a battle scene, six silver spoons, two disc brooches of gold and silver, a belt buckle and three gilded mounts. He gave the matter no weight: he put the rest aside and used the dish as a drinking trough for his chicks, then went back to the fields. Only the following year did Bernardino Biondelli, director of the numismatic cabinet of Milan, on holiday nearby, happen to see it and understand what it was. The objects ended up in Verona, and since 1928 they have been in the museum of Castelvecchio. Out in the fields, at Casalandri, there is instead a necropolis of the Cenomani Gauls with one hundred and eleven burials, where cremation and inhumation live side by side in the same cemetery.