Castelletto di Branduzzo

The comune carries in its name a village where nobody lives any more. It was formed on 11 October 1928, when a royal decree joined the two comuni of Castelletto Po and Branduzzo; today Branduzzo is uninhabited, but it keeps half the name. Castelletto Po has been known since the end of the twelfth century, when together with Pancarana and Bastida Pancarana it belonged to the bishop's table of Pavia; it later passed into the fief of Montebello, held by the Beccaria until 1629 and then by Spanish and Portuguese families and finally by the Spinola. Nearby stood another vanished village, Regalia, which nobody can locate any longer. The territory lies in the plain of the Oltrepò, between the Luria and Coppa torrents.

The castle of Branduzzo was built in the last decade of the fifteenth century by the Botta, a Lombard family moving between Pavia and Milan: its rise began with Giovanni, for twenty years in the service of Filippo Maria Visconti and then master of the revenues under the Sforza, and reached its height with his son Bergonzo, master of the revenues in his turn. In 1634 a Botta married the last heiress of the Adorno doges and the two names became one, Botta Adorno. Little is left of the castle today: for decades there has been no money even for ordinary upkeep, and to thefts and vandalism is owed the tearing away of the precious fifteenth-century terracotta roundels, which are cited even in manuals of architecture. In the village, instead, stands the monument to Giovanni Ballestra, a captain of the air force, who on 18 January 1979 stayed at the controls of his F-104 Starfighter and crashed to the ground rather than let it fall on the houses of Branduzzo.