Besenzone lies in the plain between two watercourses, and about its name the seventeenth-century historian Pier Maria Campi had a grand idea: the founder would have been one Besenzone, son or great-nephew of the «most cruel» Mezentius, king of Tuscany, who would have inherited from him both the dominion and the ruthlessness. Another historian, Poggiali, dismissed Campi's work as «not written with that exactness which our century desires in works of this kind», and two centuries later Nicolli offered a less romantic explanation: from bezze or betie, that is pasture.
The oldest thing in the comune is at Colombare di Bersano: a Bronze Age terramare, excavated at the end of the nineteenth century and presented to the Accademia dei Lincei in 1893 by Luigi Pigorini. Measuring the ditch — three metres deep and twenty wide — and everything else, Pigorini noticed that every figure was divisible by five, and concluded that those people already had a unit of measure of their own. As for recent history, in 1029 the emperor Conrad II invested Uberto Pallavicino with these lands, and for eight centuries Besenzone followed the fortunes of Cortemaggiore: it became a comune of its own only in 1814. One last thing, from 1595: when the foundation stone of the church at Mercore was laid, two flasks were put under it, one of oil and one of wine.
Straight-line distances from the town centre. Tap a point to open its page.
Near Besenzone
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
