ROCCA DI VALLE DI CASTRIGNANO

It all began in Valle di Castrignano, an ancient village in the Langhirano hills of Parma, consisting of numerous buildings dating back to the medieval period.

The heart of the precious inhabited area, represented by the complex called "La Rocca", developed from the late medieval period as a defensive complex placed to guard the only road connecting with the castle of Castrignano, a property once disputed between the powerful families of Terzi and Rossi. 

This branch of the Via Francigena, recognized at the time as "Via dei Lombardi" or "Via dei monti di Parma", was traveled by pilgrims who, coming from Northern Europe, traveled through Parma to Rome, stopping in villages, churches, xenodochi placed along the route.

Over the centuries, the medieval towers are flanked by arcades, arcades, gardens, the defensive functions are replaced by those of residence; It was in these years, between the 18th and 19th centuries, that the Cavatorta, ancient owners of the fortress, carried out the necessary modernization and expansion works on the complex. The ancient defense towers take the pleasant forms of country residence, linked to agricultural activity.

One of them, Domenico Cavatorta, physicist, was portrayed by the painter Bisoli in a picture painted in 1836 inside the Academy of Fine Arts in Parma of the Duchess Maria Luigia of Austria.

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In 1905, at the Rocca di Valle di Castrignano, Parmigiano-Reggiano was still cooked with fire. There was a small toll booth, of typical architecture, for two boilers: two forms, at that time, came out of the milk every morning and who knows how long this ritual had been taking place unchanged between the white walls of the medieval towers of the village.

The Campelli family, owner of the complex since the early 1900s, as well as four other estates, three in the Parma plain, the Piccionaia, the Serafina and Riva Bianca, and one in the hills, the Fornello, was made up of many brothers and many people then populated the Rocca, all engaged in agricultural activity.

The towers and old architectures, built seven centuries ago with white stones hardly dug out of the cultivated land, were then not only the memory of a mysterious past, made up of wars, fables and legends, but a place of production in harmony with the surrounding environment, made up of woods, oaks and large crops. 

Life flowed in this way in the Rocca, once belonging to the Cavatorta family, with its rhythms unchanged for centuries. The people, the granaries, the stables, the houses, the woods, the fields of the Campelli family coexisted united by a single purpose: to bring to light, every morning, the two forms of Parmigiano Reggiano from the small toll booth.  

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Today the Campelli Farm is made up of three hundred heads of the Italian Friesian breed, of which about one hundred and forty in lactation. It owns seventy hectares of land, cultivated for organic forage, respecting crop rotation, thus alternating alfalfa with cereals.

It produces and sells Parmigiano-Reggiano.

Every day, for over a hundred years.