THE GURGULARE HERMITAGE

THE GURGULARE HERMITAGE 
HISTORIC PLACE OF CALENDASCO

detail of the entrance to the Romitorio medieval hospital "del Gorgolare" now private property

BY UMBERTO BATTINI
       POPULAR HISTORIAN

This text is part of a more substantial study, which appeared in newspaper articles in Piacenza and was published in books by the same Author

An interesting local historical question, but one that made headlines in volumes published in Rome and elsewhere a few centuries ago, concerns the hospital known as “of the gorgolare”, now incorporated into the small village of Calendasco.

We have done a careful search and it turns out that it was a place known both “geographically” and “topographically” as early as ’600 by well-known historians.
The first to deal with it in 1568 was the historian of Noto Girolamo Pugliese, in one of his study books dedicated to the patron saint of that Sicilian city, who holds his holy body.
In the village on the Po River in Calendasco, until a few years ago, although abandoned, there was still a mill on the Confaloniero stream, which had been completely intubated for several decades. 

 

Practically behind the current town hall built a century ago on the lawn annexed to the mill, as evidenced for example by the Napoleonic land registry.
The ancient place, still called “molino Baffoni” in 1800, which was its owner, had a water channel that turned at an angle right near the ancient medieval hospital. 
From this unmistakable sound of the waters, which broke in this curve, the particular and local name of “hospitio del gorgolare”, produced precisely by the gurgling of the waters.

Among the historians who mention the place, therefore also dear to San Corrado for its conversion, is an important volume published in 1935 in Macerata, written by the historian Raniero Luconi in which we read that “at the beginning of the fourteenth century there existed in Piacenza, in a place called Gorgolare, a community of hermits under the obedience of Friar Aristide” the superior of the small convent hospital for pilgrims in the village.

Also in a volume of the “Acta selecta” Franciscans published in Rome in 1944 “the hermitage of the Gorgolare is mentioned where S. Corrado Confalonieri took the habit at the hands of Brother Aristide”.

Another citation comes from the historian Raffaele Pazzelli who in the volume printed in Rome in 1958 by the General Curia of the Franciscan Tower cites verbatim, censoring all the tertiary places in Italy: “the third place whose memory has been handed down to us is the hermitage convent of Calendasco near Piacenza” located right next to the mill canal.

 

 BY UMBERTO BATTINI
        POPULAR HISTORIAN

 

This text is part of a more substantial study, which appeared in newspaper articles in Piacenza and was published in books by the same Author