Gussola

The fair of Gussola culminates on Saint Lawrence's day, and the saint comes from a village that no longer exists. Not far off, in the Valdoria district, there was a settlement with its church of San Lorenzo; the floods of the Po inundated it so often that the church was pulled down and the people moved to Gussola, better sheltered from the water. Of the lost village the date of the festival remains. Some also derive the municipality's name from there: the little church that replaced the big one, ghisiuola in dialect, or else the Latin Lacusculum, little lake.

In 1142 the inhabitants swore fealty to the bishop of Cremona, and the parchments bearing the village's old names, Lagoxolam and La Guxola, were transcribed by a nineteenth-century parson before ending up in Leningrad. In 1625 the fief was sold to Giacomo Antonio Annoni, who to make the deed valid had to swear to the king of Spain. In the municipal arms are three vipers gripped in a hand: by local tradition they stand for the civic virtues of one ready to give his life for his own land. Two thousand eight hundred and seventy-three inhabitants in the province of Cremona.