Castiraga Vidardo

Castiraga Vidardo is a young municipality with a very old coat of arms. It was created in 1902 by detaching from Marudo the hamlets of Castiraga da Reggio and Vidardo, which had been independent until 1869; the seat ended up at Vidardo, which gives the village its dialect name, Vidàrd. The arms, granted by royal decree of 17 May 1937, hold the two centres together by illustrating their etymology: a tent for Castiraga, read as Castrum regis, "the king's camp", meaning the one Frederick Barbarossa is said to have pitched here in 1158 during the war between Milan and the old Laus; and an arrow for Vidardo, formerly Vicodardum, "village of darts", after the dart works the Boii Gauls are supposed to have had there.

What is documented in the village is more modest and more solid: at Castiraga the oratory of Santa Croce, from the eleventh century, holds a painting of the Morazzone school, while at Vidardo the parish church of San Michele Arcangelo dates from the eighteenth century. Recent history, by contrast, is made of factories: a paper mill worked here from the nineteen-sixties to the year two thousand, and from the nineteen-seventies to the nineteen-nineties a Philips household-appliance plant, among the largest employers in the Lodi area and in the Santangiolino in particular. That site is now a residential quarter, and the roughly two thousand six hundred inhabitants divide their days between the maize fields and commuting to Milan, Pavia and Lodi.