Special thanks to the author: Renzo Carosio
The story of the Cane Corso, coincides extraordinarily with the
history of the Italian peoples, in all the splendor and their
misery. Unfortunately this race, saved in the last few years
from what seemed an inexorable and fatal decline, reaches us
with a scanty but still significant historical and iconographic
background from which a few enthusiasts have tried to
reconstruct the origins of this race.
The etymology of the name Corso is still uncertain. The most
credible hypothesis are those which indicate Greek origins:
KORTOS = wall and from the Latin: COHORS = guard of the
courtyard.
Until recently the oldest documentation citing the
name of the Cane Corso, consisted of a few poems and some prose
dating from 1500. In 1998 the A.I.C.C. or Associazione Italiana
Cane Corso published a study on the race which brought to light
the military use of the Cane Corso, in 1137 in Monopoli di
Sabina (near Rome), the finding of kennels from the period and
the close links between the race and Roman history.
All of this
allows us to consider the Cane Corso, as the principal evidence
of an ancestral race which has maintained particular
characteristics over the centuries, which take us back in time,
not just to the period tied to agricultural economy immediately
prior to the industrial revolution, but even further back
linking dog fanciers with the great civilizations of the past;
the rise and fall of the Roman empire, the middle ages and
modern times.
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