Bonemerse

The village's name comes from a church and means, literally, «of the good wares»: Sancta Maria de Bonemercis in a document of 1271, Sancta Maria de Bonis Mercibus in one of 1385. For centuries that church gave its name to this whole strip of countryside outside Cremona, where the land belonged to the bishop's table. On the founding of the parish church of Santa Maria Nascente, which stands near the crossing of the old via del Po — a partly river route that linked Turin with Venice — the sources disagree: the Cremonese historian Cavitelli credits it to bishop Sicardo, who is said to have paid for it with his own money and that of his brothers and of the knight Brocardo, and dates it to 1195; the pastoral visits of bishop Novasconi move it to 1213; the archive documents attest it with certainty from 1267.

The rest of the territory is made of farmsteads, and they are older than the village: Farisengo is named in a document of 965, Carettolo and Conziolo in one of 983, and then come Cambiaga, Sant'Omobono, Gambara, Casazza. In the nineteenth century only a third of the inhabitants lived in the village itself: all the others were out in the farms, which emptied in the nineteen-sixties with the mechanisation of agriculture. Until 2012 there was also the Peverone farmstead, known as the Vatican, which had a fifteenth-century noble palace built into it. And there is one thing from an altogether different age: an enormous euro symbol laid out on the ground and visible from above, which gives its name to the park around it.