Castelnuovo Bocca d'Adda

For more than a century the books repeated a wrong date, and it was a man from here who corrected it. Both Giovanni Agnelli and don Rinaldi, in their studies of the Lodi country, took as good the first appearance of «Bocca d'Adda» in 1139, trusting those who had come before them without going to look at the original; the local historian Gianantonio Pisati went and checked, and that geographical qualifier turns up only between 1185 and 1189, in a document on the «Rationes Communis Cremone in Castronovo Boca Adue». The older name, in a parchment of 1133, was another one: «Castelnuovo della Badessa», the abbess's Castelnuovo, because since 879 the village had belonged to a monastery of Piacenza.

The rest is water and sieges. Castelnuovo stands where the Adda enters the Po, and it was a position worth taking: in 1319 Galeazzo I Visconti besieged it with a large river fleet and was driven back; the castle had already been burned by the men of Parma in 1188 and was then destroyed in 1419 by the Count of Carmagnola. The fortress one sees today is of 1520. The parish church, consecrated on 14 July 1471, is by date the doyenne of the parish churches of the diocese of Lodi. And here is the last weir on the Adda: below it the water is full of barbel, and the fishermen have always known it.