History
The village name derives from the plant of myrtle, in Latin language just called "murta".
The first documents on the Parish of Murta dates from 1143, when it was included on the Register of Diocese of Genoa (wanted by Archbishop Siro II) as a chapel subject to the main church of Rivarolo.
In Murta was born Giovanni da Murta which was the second Doge of the Republic of Genoa from 1344 to 1350.
Like all Valpolcevera, in 1746 the village was involved in War of Austrian Succession and was occupied by an Austrian-Piedmontese army led by the General Botta Adorno, which came up to Genoa, from where was expelled after the popular revolt of December 5th, 1746, set up with the legendary episode of Balilla.
Another Austrian army returned the following year and this time the occupation, lasted from April 11 to July 19, 1747, had even more devastating effects. The Austrians had their headquarters in the Palace Bonarota (Villa Clorinda) and their troops devastated the entire village. All the church vestments and vessels were stolen and the church itself seriously damaged. Also many private houses were plundered and many of them also burnt-out. The local historian Luigi Persoglio wrote that 350 people died, some because of fighting against the invaders, but most for hardships and privations that people suffered in those tragic months.
Read more about this topic: Murta (Genoa)
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“We don’t know when our name came into being or how some distant ancestor acquired it. We don’t understand our name at all, we don’t know its history and yet we bear it with exalted fidelity, we merge with it, we like it, we are ridiculously proud of it as if we had thought it up ourselves in a moment of brilliant inspiration.”
—Milan Kundera (b. 1929)
“I am ashamed to see what a shallow village tale our so-called History is. How many times must we say Rome, and Paris, and Constantinople! What does Rome know of rat and lizard? What are Olympiads and Consulates to these neighboring systems of being? Nay, what food or experience or succor have they for the Esquimaux seal-hunter, or the Kanaka in his canoe, for the fisherman, the stevedore, the porter?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The history of all Magazines shows plainly that those which have attained celebrity were indebted for it to articles similar in natureto Berenice—although, I grant you, far superior in style and execution. I say similar in nature. You ask me in what does this nature consist? In the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque: the fearful coloured into the horrible: the witty exaggerated into the burlesque: the singular wrought out into the strange and mystical.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)