Paullo

The name comes from the Latin palus, paludis: the village grew beside a marsh, the last remnant of the Gerundo lake formed by floods of the Adda and Serio and still named in medieval charters. The Romans drained much of it into the Fossa Mucia, named after the magistrate Mucius who ran the work: hence the Muzza canal, dug in the first half of the twelfth century and counted among the great irrigation works of medieval Europe. In the fifteenth century Francesco Sforza had two towers and a moat built to guard it from Venice.

The road from Milan to Cremona is named the Paullese after the village. In the sixteenth century the fief passed from the Carcassola to the Tasso of Cornello, who took the title of marquesses: their colours sit in the town's arms beside the crowned Carcassola eagle and the gold pales of the Ordogno de Rosales. Long tied to the county and diocese of Lodi, Paullo chose not to join the new province of Lodi in 1992 and stayed with Milan; in 2009 it received the title of city.