Fombio

The church of Fombio has collapsed twice: in 1928 part of the dome gave way, and in 1974, despite the repairs, it came down again, worse. It was during the rebuilding that people discovered what lay beneath. Outside the perimeter of the original building — founded in May 1390 by Alberto Scotti — a good quantity of bones came to light with no graves around them, of people of low stature and with strangely large bones. Inside the oldest part there were four small brick rooms with vaulted ceilings, full of human remains mixed with lime, and among them the almost complete skeleton of a woman whose skull still bore a long braid of black hair. There were also four tombs two metres twenty long: in one a body in sacred vestments, with buckles and a copper-coloured eighteenth-century wig; in another a man dressed in the Spanish fashion, stockings to the calf and breeches tied below the knee.

The village's name comes from the river: anciently Flumpo or Flumbo, a contraction of Ad Flumen Padum, "at the river Po", because the spur on which the castle stands was the point where the Via Emilia met the Po. From 723, by the donation of the Lombard king Liutprand, Fombio belonged to the Pavia monastery of San Pietro in Ciel d'Oro; in 1299 it became the fief of Alberto Scotti, who built the castle there. Towards Guardamiglio, in 1796, one of the first clashes between the French and the Austrians in Lombardy was fought: more than five thousand grenadiers under Jean Lannes against the handful of general Lipthay, who lost over five hundred men and twenty guns; among the French, general Amédée de la Harpe was killed by a stray bullet from his own side.