Mezzane di Sotto

On the coat of arms of Mezzane di Sotto there is a tower, and it is the one that stands in the middle of the village: originally, though, it was not a tower, it was the bell tower of the old parish church. The church stood on the valley floor and floods and earthquakes kept damaging it, so at the end of the nineteenth century it was rebuilt higher up to a design by the architect Gottardi; the twelfth-century tuff bell tower, on the other hand, stayed down in the square, without its church. Into the new church were carried the works of the old pieve, which pope Eugene III already mentions in 1145: an altarpiece by Girolamo dai Libri with the Virgin enthroned between Saints Paul and Catherine and, below, the members of the Della Torre family, and then canvases by Antonio Giarola, by Claudio Ridolfi and by Giovanni Caliari.

The most surprising thing, however, is higher up, at Castagnè, and one must look closely at the bell tower: set into its wall are the pediments of two Roman funerary stelae. On the first, two rabbits sit on the slopes facing outwards and in the tympanum there is a shell between two dolphins; the panel where the Latin inscription stood has been scraped and re-carved with a text in the vernacular giving the date the bell tower was built. On the second, in the frieze, two rabbits gnaw at grapes between two griffins with a paw raised on a vase, and in place of the ancient epigraph are the monograms of Jesus and Mary. That the Romans had been in this valley was already known: the via Cara passed through here from the Postumia, and Theodor Mommsen gave space to the local inscriptions in his Corpus, reconstructing the story of a small temple dedicated to Jupiter.