Bagnaria

From the imperial investiture of 1164 Bagnaria belonged to the marquisate of the Malaspina, but for centuries it kept a status that made it something more than a fief. Passing in the sixteenth century to the Doria princes, it obtained recognition once again as an imperial fief, that is an exempt one: a condition even more privileged than that of the separate jurisdictions of the Oltrepò, with complete judicial and fiscal autonomy — in practice a small independent state. Elsewhere a man condemned by a feudal judge could appeal to the magistracy of the state; here the appeal went to the tribunal of prince Doria. On the thirty-first of July 1656, its status as an imperial fief confirmed, Bagnaria formally freed itself from the duchy of Milan. And it was so little assimilable to the rest that, when the fiefs of the Staffora valley were aggregated to the provinces of the duchy, Bagnaria fell not to Pavia but to Tortona, and belonged to the Tortona district until the nineteenth century.

In 1630 a market was set up here for goods arriving from Genoa — salt, soap and oil — with reductions on the tolls, to be paid for with grain from the Milanese; the Senate of Milan forbade it the following year. The name comes from the Latin balnearia, which refers to marshy ground or, according to some, to thermal waters; until 1863 the village was called Bagnara. The branch of the Malaspina that had held it was extinguished at a stroke at the beginning of the fifteenth century, when all its members were murdered in the castle of Olivola, in Lunigiana, and in the dispersal of their goods the fief was bought by the noble Busseti of Tortona. Later Bagnaria passed to Savoy, then to Napoleonic France, and at last to the new province of Pavia, and so to Lombardy. In 1929 it was aggregated to the comune of Varzi and in 1946 it recovered its autonomy. Between 1931 and 1966 it had a railway station of its own, on the line from Voghera to Varzi.