San Pietro di Morubio

In the little church of Santa Caterina, in the hamlet of Borgo, as soon as you go in, on the left, there is a wooden wheel. It is the instrument of the martyrdom of Saint Catherine of Alexandria, to whom the church is dedicated: not a painting telling the story, the object itself. Over the high altar there is a fifteenth-century altarpiece of the saint, and in the sacristy a Saint Charles Borromeo painted in the seventeenth century by a hand we do not know. The name of the town is an unresolved story too: it was a contrada dependent on Roverchiara which broke away in the age of the comuni, and in the documents it turns up as Moruiolo, Marubio, Morugio, Morugiolo; then it took the name of a watercourse that ran along its edge, the Fossa Sancti Petri. As for Morubio, either it comes from the noble house of the Rubiani or it comes from the mulberry tree, which in the Verona dialect is called moraro.

The rest is work. In the seventeenth century they cleared land from the marshes and channelled the water into ditches flowing into bigger ones; they began to grow rice, wheat and fruit, but poverty stayed great and charitable confraternities were founded. The landowners gave wide spaces to vegetable gardens and orchards, and some contrade are still called Orti and Bel Brolo. In the nineteenth century new crops arrived, the sugar beet and the castor plant, and at San Pietro and Bonavicina oil mills and tobacco works went up. Then people left: Brazil, Argentina, Australia, Canada, Germany, France, Switzerland, and from the fifties whole families towards Milan, Turin, Genoa and Verona. Those who stayed work art furniture and wrought iron. The parish church was begun in 1789 and opened for worship in 1797, reusing the late baroque altar of the church that had stood there before; its belltower, finished in 1815, is thirty-eight metres high.