Gombito

For some years now this village has been known for a race: the snail race, held usually between the end of August and the beginning of September, which draws hundreds of visitors and some eighty competitors. The rules are exact. The distance is one metre. Each competitor enters a snail, which may be his own or one issued by the judges at the moment of registration, and the winner is the one that covers the metre in the shortest time. The other date the village keeps is older and shared with much of the Cremona and Lodi country: the days of the blackbird, the twenty-ninth, the thirtieth and the thirty-first of January.

The coat of arms granted in 1953 carries two blue bands on a red field, and they are the two rivers that cross the territory, the Adda and the Serio; the three ears of wheat stand for the farming this land lives on. The village is older than the first document that names it: it appears as Gomedo in a diploma of king Henry the third, of 1055, by which the Isola Fulcheria — until then the property of the marquis Boniface — was given in perpetuity to the church of Cremona. In 1420 Filippo Visconti gave Gombito in fief to Cabrino Fondulo, making him marquis of Castelleone; in 1652 it passed to the Ponzone of Cremona. In 1751 the place had a little over five hundred inhabitants and two masters at once: it was administered by a general council, but justice was in the hands of the feudal podestà, the Ala Ponzone, one of whom bore the title of lord of Gombito, and of the podestà of Cremona as well. That double jurisdiction ended in 1796, with the suppression of feudal rights.