Robecco sul Naviglio

Until 1862 the town was called simply Robecco: the rest of the name came from the Naviglio Grande, dug at the end of the twelfth century, which cuts through the village and made its fortune. The first settlement was elsewhere, at Casterno, towards the Ticino, where the Romans kept a camp guarding the fords; Casterno still had walls when, in the mid-thirteenth century, Frederick II pulled them down on his march against Milan. In 1576, with the plague, the Spanish governor, the marquis of Ayamonte, ran the boundary between infected Milanese land and healthy Pavian land along the canal, leaving the village under two administrations.

From the sixteenth century Milanese nobles bought land here and built villas along the canal: Villa Gaia already bore that name by the late fifteenth century, as Ludovico il Moro's pleasure court, and the town hall occupies Villa Scotti, built in the nineteenth century for a family of beekeepers. The stepped bridge was thrown across in 1842 with a bequest from Cardinal Antonio Dugnani, replacing the floating bridge laid for the patronal procession. The arms, a red lion gazing at an eight-rayed star, are borrowed from the medieval da Robeco family, who never held a fief here. In July 1944 eight townsmen were shot in reprisal and fifty-eight deported to Germany, where nine died; the town received the silver medal for civil merit.