Treviglio

The coming and going of trains never stops here: this crossroads of roads and railways has always been the centre of the Gera d'Adda. But the town was born of a defensive union of three villages, and for centuries it remembered that in everything: in its three gates, each facing the settlement it came from, and in the way it governed itself, because every village elected twenty consuls, sixty in all, who held office for six months only, so that in turn everyone came to run the place. A fourth gate came later, and it bears the name of Oriano: from there came the refugees of a village near Brescia destroyed in the war between Arduin of Ivrea and Henry II, who settled here around the year one thousand and made the walls larger.

Standing on a frontier, however, cost dearly. On the eighth of May 1509 the Venetians sacked and burnt Treviglio; Louis XII of France, who saw the flames from the far side of the Adda, crossed the river and defeated them at Agnadello, and from that day the Venetian Republic stopped expanding on the mainland. Thirteen years later the town again risked being sacked and was saved by a miracle: the Madonna painted in the convent of the Augustinian nuns wept, and the French general Lautrec laid his helmet and sword at her feet, where the sanctuary keeps them still, and ordered the retreat. The people of Treviglio, for that matter, have always bought their own liberties: when the Spanish put the town up for auction as a fief, they taxed themselves and redeemed it on their own. Austria took away its title of city for the risings of eighteen forty-eight, and Victor Emmanuel II gave it back in 1860.