Our headquarters: between history and legend

History, legend, mystery and…the Nomadi! The year? Between 1994 and the first years of the seventeenth century there seems to be no difference. The lawn is the same, isolated there, in the middle, in that village of Sorgà, exactly in the low Veronese country, bordering on the province of Mantua. “Il Palazzon” never moved from there. Not in 1994, headquarters of the association “Amici dei Nomadi”, nor back then. And with it there is still that fascination that wraps it, like in legends, since its origin. They started to call it “Palazzon del diaolo” (the Devil’s Palace) soon after its construction that goes back to the second half of Cinquecento. It was commissioned by the noble veronese family Bertoldi, who were then the owners of the place, and modelled on drawings by Giulio Romano, now kept in the Murari Brà archive. And here we go, backwards, to “our” twentieth century, to the nineteenth century and the Industrial Revolution, to the eighteenth century, down backwards to that Cinquecento, to that Sorgà, that is to the Vicariate of Sorgà, a feud of the monastery of St. Maria in Organo until 1517 and then of the family Murari Dalla Corte. And here we find the isolated “Palazzon”, “il Palasson del Diaolo” whisper local elderly people to the curious traveller still today. Two floors and a basement: the southern façade is spaced out by four pilaster strips with ionic capitals that support an architrave surmounted by a triangular frame. These architectural relieves, with the small terrace on the first floor and the four chimney pots, alone manage to make the massive building of the Cinquecento slender. In the western part of the court there is a residence building facing south which in 1653 was called “casa del lavoratore” (worker’s house) and in 1948 “casa colonica” (farmhouse). In the second half of the nineteenth century it underwent a process of restructure and, in particular, the dovecote tower was changed according to the neo-medieval fashion of the time, adding on its top a string of ghibelline merlons. The aim was adapting it to a residence. These are all architectonic particulars that intermingle with the popular tradition. It is told that the Devil himself was the owner. A house to be accurately avoided, this was the order, the diktat of those times. The Palazzon was a setting for luxurious feasts, into which the Devil himself would have taken part, says a legend, but also, says another legend, a building wanted by the court buffoon of Gonzaga from Mantua, to be used as diplomatic headquarters between the Veronese and Mantuan territory. Here the delegates of the Dukes of Mantua and of the Della Scala met and tried to reach peace agreements in the bordering territories between the two dominions. Even if it was never inhabited, the villa has become the main monument in Sorgà, maybe also thanks to its fame as a cursed place. Therefore, in 1993 Roberto Rigoni, a fan of the group I Nomadi, thought of discrediting the legend, setting in the villa the headquarters of the cultural association “Amici dei Nomadi”, with the permission of Giacomo Murari of court Brà. “Satan if he was ever here- they say at the club, smiling- has gone away, or has become a fan of the Nomadi. After all, don’t they say that rock is the Devil’s music?”