Casalpusterlengo

The name comes from the Pusterla, the family that held the town in the fourteenth century; a second theory traces it instead to Casale Pistorum, after the baking ovens built here in Roman times. Earlier still the place was called Casale Gausari. Of the Pusterla castle only a battlemented tower survives, in two stacked blocks, and it is that tower the town's arms carry in red on a silver field, set on a grassy plain. In 1447, when Milan was under the Ambrosian Republic, Venetian troops besieged the castle to open their road to the city: the stronghold held, while Lodi and San Colombano surrendered.

The town's real institution, though, was the Monday market, described in written sources from the sixteenth century on. In 1590 the commune fought the Lampugnani lord over it and the Senate of Milan recognised the community's right to the square; in 1766 an official called it the largest in the whole Lodi province, praising the width of the town, its arcades, shops and tents. In June 1733 the parish priest Carlo Francesco Tonani took in Carlo Goldoni, attacked while travelling from Parma to Brescia; a plaque on the front still records it, and Goldoni himself wrote about the stop in his memoirs.