Battuda

The name of this village is the ground it stands on: it comes from the Pavese dialect batüda or batüva, used to mean beaten earth or a beaten track. Battuda has belonged from remote times to the territory of Pavia and was part of the Campagna Soprana of Pavia; it was included in the fief of Marcignago, passed to the Pallavicino in 1539 and to the Isimbardi of Pavia in the following century, and in the seventeen hundreds it was enfeoffed to the Bellini of Milan, within the fief of Vellezzo Bellini. In 1872 the suppressed comuni of Torradello and Torrino were joined to it. The arms too are honest about how little there is to draw: the main charge is the letter B, the initial of the comune's name, and the stars beside it are taken from the Isimbardi blazon.

The parish church of the Nativity of the Virgin was built between 1554 and 1579, although the parish is first mentioned in 1460. But the building worth the walk is the smallest one, in the hamlet of Torrino: the church of San Riccardo Pampuri, dedicated to him because during his life he lived here, with his uncle and aunt. Its single nave is ten metres long, and beside it stands a bell tower fourteen metres high with three bells — which, however, have neither wheel nor clapper, because the tower would not hold, and so they hang there fixed; the structure is held together by iron blocks put in on purpose to improve its stability. A bell tower with three bells that cannot ring. The village, which lies in the plain between the Ticino and the Naviglio Pavese, had two hundred inhabitants in the middle of the seventeen hundreds and a little over three hundred a century later.