The town of Correggio is like a woman that wraps you around her sensuous waist. She is soft and jovial, filled with feverish dreams. But she is so changeable. Her mood embodies the chiaroscuro of a Renaissance canvas as light and dark permeate her history and chronicles.
A bit mysterious, elegant by nature yet rural, this lady of a town is only nine miles away from Reggio Emilia and 15 miles off the “Motor Valley,” an area running between Modena, Maranello, and Bologna that encompasses factories, showrooms, and museums of the supercar manufacturers Ferrari, Maserati, Lamborghini, and Pagani. The aristocratic city of Parma is a 30-mile drive.
The Correggesi, or inhabitants of Correggio, know how to savor life in this corner of Emilia-Romagna where superfoods, fine wines, and art are offered.
Around 1489, the town gave birth to Antonio Allegri da Correggio, a High Renaissance painter known simply as Correggio. An art master of the Parma school, he spent his entire life in Italy’s northern plains, but he achieved a wide audience early on because his works were appreciated at the great courts of Europe. His sensual art amazes; it prefigured the Baroque art of the 17th century and the Rococo movement of the 18th century through his dramatic illusionistic style, a mix of light and shadow woven together on his figures.
“Jupiter and Io” is a Correggio painting that hangs in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. It depicts a beautiful woman embraced by a cloud. Her soft naked body shimmers in the light and by contrast, a thick, dark cloud reveals the magnetic face of Zeus who fell in love with her. The god disguised as cloud envelops her, his nebular hand around her waist. What words of love is he whispering in her ear?
The town of Correggio is classic Italy without crowds. “It’s a quiet locale. Moreover, it is a medieval jewel frozen in time that reached its splendor during the Renaissance and had its court,” explains Francesca Manzini, head of the local tourist office.
Correggio derives its name from the Latin word corrigia, which translates as belt or leather strip. Legend has it that in a battle the founder of the fiefdom was seriously injured around the waist but the Madonna intervened and spared his life for a reason. He had to start the Da Correggio dynasty, a princely family that ruled the tiny city-state until 1635. The Da Correggio had extensive relationships with the Gonzaga court in Mantua but was rival to the Este family in Ferrara and the Visconti family in Milan. For a short period in the 14th century, some members of the noble family were lords of the city of Parma, including condottiere Azzo Correggio, a friend of the poet Petrarch.
Their Palazzo dei Principi is a must-see building along Corso Cavour, the heart of the old city. The elegant palace houses the Museo Il Correggio and the central library. “The Museum holds three artworks from master painter Correggio who for the local convent church of St. Francis painted the altarpiece the Madonna of St. Francis, now held in Dresden, and the painting The Rest on the Flight to Egypt with Saint Francis now in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence,” says Francesca Manzini.
The museum’s collections tell the story of the town from Roman times as it developed as a medieval and Renaissance town. An archaeology collection provides evidence of the early Roman period, while the painting collection is particularly strong in reflecting the art history from the 15th to the 19th centuries. “The museum also displays an exquisite collection of Flemish tapestries,” says Francesca. “But its masterpiece is Christ the Redeemer, a 1393 tempera on canvas painting by the Renaissance master Andrea Mantegna,” she points out. It’s a very intense, intimate portrait of Christ wearing a red tunic and looking out from a red frame where a Latin inscription reads: “It’s me, do not be afraid.” Christ is staring at you. His face is sad, reflecting a melancholy state of humanity expecting salvation.
The next stop in town should be Corso Mazzini, a boulevard punctuated with arcades, cafes, and osterie that offer a real slice of Correggio life. If you stop for lunch, do not miss a glass of Lambrusco wine and the local specialty scarpasot – a salty fried tart made of chards, pork lard, parmesan cheese, and eggs. Then be reminded that you are in Emilia-Romagna where the pig is king. There is plenty of cured meat: mortadella, salami della casa and prosciutti. Pork processing plants are everywhere. One of them is Veroni Salumi, a family-owned producer of cured ham, salami, and other sliced meats. Founded in 1925 by five siblings, in 2015 Veroni branched out to the US market by establishing their headquarters in Logan, New Jersey to provide their traditional recipes to Americans.
Back at Corso Mazzini, visitors like to stop at house number 11. There, they soon notice a pharmacy but nothing’s special about it. So they begin to peruse the facade of the building. They must have been told that the “Soapmaker of Correggio” had lived there. Dubbed that way by the post-war press, Leonarda Cianciulli was neither an artist nor a wonderful woman. Her original apartment was torn apart a long time ago. It had required a fully gutted renovation. She was a female serial killer, the first in Italy. She exhibited diabolical cruelty without ever seeking redemption. Afflicted with dissociative psychosis, she murdered three women from Correggio between 1939 and 1940. “During the murder trial after WWII in 1946, the prosecutor proved that she killed for money,” says Francesca Manzini. After putting her victims to death, she dissected the bodies.
Cianciulli was born down south in the Irpinia region in 1894. She raised four children and survived seventeen abortions. “She moved to Correggio in 1930 when her husband was sent to work for the local registry office,” explains Francesca Manzini. She was not poor at all. She was a housewife from a middle-class household who sold vintage clothes and antiques and offered palmistry services. “But she had planned to become richer and richer,” says Francesca.
Her maid testified in court as a witness and Cianciulli spent the rest of her life locked up in a judiciary mental hospital in Pozzuoli where she died in 1970. “Also her maid ended up in a psychiatric asylum because she went crazy after what she saw in Cianciulli’s home,” remarks Francesca. In her memoir, Cianciulli described putting chopped body parts into a cauldron. She added caustic soda to make soaps and in some cases sugar, chocolate, milk, and eggs to make pastries. And she served them to the ladies who knocked at her door, she wrote. But her hard-to-believe recollection of the macabre facts was proven to be false.
Despite those hellish aspects of life in Correggio in the 1940s, today the place remains a kind of heaven. Correggio-born rocker Luciano Ligabue released several songs inspired by his hometown. His ballads provide a powerful snapshot of the rural land that accommodates world-leading industries in the plastic and automotive sectors such as Spal and Corghi. The latter invented and patented the world’s first tire charger and is a historical Ferrari supplier.
A Ligabue hit, Certe Notti, describes the freedom of the road, the nocturnal mood of Correggio. It goes: “Some nights the car is hot /And where it takes you is up to her /Some nights the road doesn’t matter / It’s feeling that you are driving that counts…” In another famous song, Correggio is defined as a Piccola Città Eterna or Little Eternal City.
As well, Ligabue portrayed the area through a collection of short stories about his formative years, coming of age in rural Correggio. The title of the book is Fuori e Dentro Il Borgo. The pages are populated by colorful characters and their quirky stories.
The successful songwriter has been often inspired by the work of another illustrious son of Correggio, Pier Vittorio Tondelli, a postmodern writer who died of Aids in 1991 aged just 36. He burst upon the literary scene with the “on the road” stories of Altri Libertini (1980; Other Libertines). His career culminated with the reflections on grief, sickness, and death in Camere Separate (1989; Separate Rooms). In the months leading up to his death, he returned to the Catholic faith.
The Palazzo dei Principi houses a center for the study of Tondelli’s work (Centro di Documentazione Pier Vittorio Tondelli) and his personal library.
Nearby, the Parco della Memoria is the town’s breathing space: a large park dedicated to the fallen of WWI and WWII. The urban forest features ornamental ponds, its trees projecting the light and the shadows of Correggio.
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