Meleti

According to the historian Giovanni Agnelli the name of Meleti is of Umbrian origin, and in an old document it appears as «waldo Meleto», that is, the forest of Meleto: before the fields, here there was wood. The village changed hands many times, like all the small fiefs of the lower Lodi plain. In the twelfth century it belonged to the church of Milan; then it fell to families of the Lodi country — Stampa, Pusterla, Selvatico, Corno — and to the bishop of Lodi, who in 1344 was forced to cede it to the Visconti. In 1385 it ended up in the fief of Maccastorna, in 1452 Luigi Bossi bought it, for a very short time it was the Trivulzio's and at last the Figliodoni's, who in the eighteenth century became the counts Corio Visconti Figliodoni. In the Napoleonic age Meleti was reduced to a hamlet of Castelnuovo Bocca d'Adda, and took back its autonomy only with the kingdom of Lombardy-Venetia.

In a village of not even five hundred people, though, something unexpected is kept. In the parish church of San Cristoforo, rebuilt at the end of the fifteenth century, there is a reliquary with a thorn from the crown of Christ, together with other relics of the Passion and of the Virgin: the Figliodoni lords gave them in 1681, and they came from the church of San Barnaba in Milan. Outside the village, at Santa Giulitta, stands the oratory of Saints Quiricus and Julietta, of 1630, and in the centre the palace of the Figliodoni. For the rest Meleti lives on what it has always lived on: a third of those in work are in a dozen farms, among the fields and the sheds of beef and dairy cattle.