Crotta d'Adda

The village stands on the banks of the Adda, not far from the point where the river ends in the Po, and it carries the name of a family. According to the source, Crotta comes from a branch of the ancient Crotta or Crotti, of Lombard stock, who in the early Middle Ages settled here coming from Bergamo. The Crotti are said to have been noble arimanni, that is Lombard warriors on horseback, established at Bergamo at the time of the invasion of 568 and then scattered into other areas of Lombardy; and the same source counts among the members of the house king Rotari, his son king Rodoaldo and the Lombard dukes of Bergamo. It is a genealogy the village has been telling itself for centuries, and it is worth what genealogies are worth: what remains is the name, and the name is still there.

On who gave the orders, by contrast, the documents are drier. In the twelfth century Crotta became the property of the church of Milan, then passed through the hands of important Lombard families. Between 1272 and 1381 it was one of seven places — together with Basiasco, Corno Giovine, Cornovecchio, Pizzighettone, Maleo and Maccastorna — over which the Vincemala family, later Vismara, exercised the mero e misto imperio, that is the full right to judge in civil and criminal matters: for more than a century, over these lands, that house held life and death as well. The village's monument is villa Stanga, and the municipal arms, granted in 1987, carry, wound around a staff, a ribbon with the Latin motto Fortitudo fatalis, fatal strength: a motto that was not the Crotti's but was adopted by the Cremonese family of the Stanga. So the village finds itself bearing one family's name and another's device.