Casei Gerola

Casei appears for the first time in 712, when the Lombard king Liutprand gave these lands to the Pavia monastery of San Pietro in Ciel d'Oro; the name would remain in that monastery's papers for centuries. In 1164 Frederick I assigned it to Pavia, together with the lands that form the nucleus of the Oltrepò, and in October 1213 the Pavians defeated the Milanese here, who had come with contingents from Alessandria, Acqui, Alba, Vercelli, Novara and Tortona. The fief passed to the Beccaria, then to the Visconti, who gave it first to Francesco Bussone da Carmagnola and in 1431 to the Ferrarese condottiero Guido Torelli: his descendants, marquises of Casei and Cornale, held it until the abolition of feudalism.

The other half of the name has a more dramatic story. Gerola stood much further to the north-west, where the Scrivia enters the Po, grown up beside a large island in the river, and it governed a municipality that included Mezzana Bigli and Guazzora too. In 1800 Napoleon decided that political boundaries should follow the course of the Po, and Gerola found itself cut into three separate stumps; then the river shifted further south and made what was left uninhabitable. The inhabitants therefore built themselves a new village, Gerola Nuova, on land belonging to Casei, and in 1835 handed over to the people of Casei what remained of their municipality, merging with them. Of the old disorder three exclaves remain, still detached today from the rest of the territory.