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The countryside surrounding Carpi

Il Canale dei Mulini: da Santa Croce e Gargallo verso Panzano Lungo il corso del Tresinaro: per Zappiano e Geminiola verso il Cantone Verso il Secchia: San Marino, Cortile e San Martino sulla Secchia Lungo le valli: da Canalvecchio verso Fossoli e Novi. La Remesina Lungo il canale di Migliarina: Budrione, Migliarina e il Canale.

The first settlements in the Carpi territory date back to the late-republican era (II/I century b.c.), when the Romans who founded the Mutina (Modena) colony, occupied the area upto the River Po and began draining the land and dividing it into plots, called "centurie". They were equally divided into plots 710 metres square.
When the Romans conquered the land of Gallia Cisalpina, the landscape was mostly made up of swamps and woods, with the presence of raised and dry areas (the so called "motte") which men had already used in the Bronze age (XIV/XII century b.c.) to build their villages, the 'terramare'.
In the Carpi countryside one can still see some "motte", the most important conserve traces of a "terramara", the "Savana", located between via San Giacomo and via dell'Industria.
The swamps and woods were made up of oak, hornbeam, ash and maple trees for the best drained soils; elm, poplar and willow trees for the marshy ones. The original vegetation that grew in the Po valley landscape, has been lost long ago.

They have slowly been replaced with single cereal crops and specialized arboreal plants (fruit trees or vines) which are wrongly identified as original elements of the Po valley landscape. Such changes have come about due to the constant and progressive abandonment of forestry-pastoral activities into more productive cultivations which have caused the loss of a particular element of this area, the "piantata" - rows of trees, which took advantage of the union of vines and supporting trees, more than any, elms, poplars and maples.

The Woods were cut down in large quantities in Roman times to cultivate the land, and successive abandonment of the "piantata" from the end of the XIX century and our present time, has led to a very productive territory but at the same time a "bare"one, with arboreal population limited to parks and villas, or marginal areas not used for agriculture.

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