Castelnovetto

The village was destroyed by the Milanese in the twelfth century, when it was called simply Castrum, the castle. It was rebuilt, and to the old name they added novetum: so in the list of Pavian lands of 1250 it appears as Castrum Novetum, the new small castle, and ever since the name has carried the memory of the destruction. Of the castle itself what remains is in the ground and in the speech: the quarter where the church of the confraternity stands is still called by the people il castello, and there is a small rise there, clearly made by men, of the kind on which strongholds were set in the plain. The bell tower of the parish church is a tower of the thirteenth-century castle, reused.

Between the fourteenth and the sixteenth century the fief changed hands about ten times: the Langosco, the Beccaria, for a moment the marquis of Monferrato, the Visconti, the Sforza, the ducal minister Cicco Simonetta, a man from Ferrara, a French cardinal, another minister, and in 1527 a Spanish captain who had distinguished himself at the battle of Pavia. Then it was sold to Marcantonio Rasini, first count of Castelnovetto, and the Rasini kept it until the end of feudalism, in 1797. The churches too were objects of exchange: the two medieval parishes here, one under Pavia and one under Vercelli, both passed to Vercelli in 1576, in a swap made against Rosasco. And in 1643 the village and its Benedictine monastery were sacked by prince Thomas of Savoy — not out of any quarrel with the place, but because he had to supply the fortress of Casale. On the map of the Duchy of Milan painted in the Vatican in 1581, meanwhile, Castelnovetto appears under a name that is simply wrong: C. Nonanta.