Basiglio

The name almost certainly comes from the Latin basis, the base of a Roman milestone: the village grew along the road from Milan down to Pavia. Other readings point to basileus, «king» or «chief», and to basei, «milestone». The oldest document naming it is fourteenth-century and spells it loco de Baxilio, with an x for the s; the red and silver bars of the coat of arms probably come from the Birago counts, who held the fief of Mettone from 1484.

On 26 October 1524, on the fields of the Penati farmstead, the French under marshal La Palice beat the Spanish troops of Ferrante d'Avalos. The easy win pushed Francis I on to Pavia, where the siege ended in the rout of 1525. In the nineteen-eighties the Milano 3 estate, built on the old hamlet of Romano Paltano, formerly a comune, multiplied the population tenfold; the town hall stands at Romano Paltano too.