Bastida Pancarana

The name says it all: bastida means the mighty embankments raised against the floods of the Po, which in these parts must have been particularly frequent. The village appears towards the end of the fourteenth century within the fief of Pancarana, a lordship of the bishop of Pavia, and at that time it probably stood on the left bank, in the Lomellina. Then the river moved: from at least the end of the sixteenth century Bastida found itself on the Oltrepò bank without having shifted an inch, and even so it remained administratively part of the Lomellina until 1800. It had been born as a fortified port, but on maps around 1700 it is marked as a ruined fort, and from then on it had no military importance at all.

Being close to the Po, however, went on costing it dearly. In the seventeen hundreds Bastida had become a large village on a regular plan that spread well to the north-east of today's centre, and further north-east again there was another large village dependent on it, Mezzano. By the end of that century the floods had reduced Bastida to a small fraction of what it had been, and from there the village began to grow again, less tidily, towards the west and the south; the parish church too was rebuilt in a more sheltered position. Only from the end of the nineteenth century has a powerful embankment really defended the houses. The coat of arms, granted in 2002, recalls the river and the hamlets that make up the comune.