Pessina Cremonese

The name belongs to a family of names — Pescarolo, Peschiera, Pescina — that all recall the same landscape: in remote times this land was partly covered by standing, marshy water, which was however rich in fish. The marsh was drained at the wish of a cavaliere, Pietro Baroli, podestà of Cremona, who improved the clay and limestone soil by having ditches and drainage channels dug; today the fields grow fodder, grass and maize, and the comune keeps more dairy cattle than the neighbouring villages along the flood plain of the Oglio. Silkworm cocoons were once produced here, and mulberry trees were very numerous. The comune, for that matter, is a set of small villages standing very close to one another — Pessina, Monticelli Ripa d'Oglio, Stilo de' Mariani, Villarocca and Sant'Antonio — which the entry describes with disarming frankness as all more or less of little or no importance; and yet it adds that, despite standing so near together, each of them can claim an origin and a history of its own.

On the twenty-first of August 2011, in a street named after Mother Teresa of Calcutta, a Sikh temple was inaugurated here, in the presence of the mayor and of the consul of India in Italy. It was designed by a local architect, covers more than two thousand square metres, stands fifteen metres high and can hold five hundred worshippers; it cost about one million three hundred thousand euro, paid partly with a bank loan and partly with the offerings of the faithful, and it is held to be the largest gurdwara in continental Europe. The year before, the mayor had had signs put up at the entrance to the village stating that this is a comune free of racial prejudice, and the Region had given the comune a special mention in its peace prize. All of this in a village of a few hundred people, in the middle of the Cremona plain.