Campospinoso

The name is a field of thorns, and the municipal coat of arms says so as a kind of joke: beside the ears of wheat, which are the countryside's chief product, there is a thorny shrub bent until it forms the letter S. The village lies in the plain of the Oltrepò Pavese, not far from the right bank of the Po, between the Scuropasso and Versa streams, and it is made of two nuclei by now almost welded together, Campospinoso and Albaredo-Casenuove. Campospinoso appears for the first time in 1250, in the list of lands subject to the dominion of Pavia, while the name of Albaredo is documented as early as 973. The village belonged to the squadra and then to the fief of Broni, whose fortunes it always followed: it was held by the Beccaria, then by the Visconti Scaramuzza from 1531 and finally by the Arrigoni of Milan, who kept it until feudalism was abolished.

The strangest affair, however, is that of the boundaries. In 1928 the comune of Albaredo Arnaboldi was united to Campospinoso and the new body took the name Campospinoso Albaredo; in 1942 a portion of that territory was detached and given to Belgioioso; and in 1948 the single comune was suppressed, reconstituting the two earlier comuni with their pre-1928 boundaries. The two villages nonetheless went on working together: in September 2000 they created the Unione Campospinoso Albaredo, a local authority in its own right. Then, on 20 November 2022, they were called to the polls for a referendum with two questions: whether really to merge, and whether to change the name. They said yes to both, and on 18 November 2023, in application of the regional law, Campospinoso went back to being called Campospinoso Albaredo — seventy-five years after the first time.