Ceretto Lomellina

Ceretto appears in a charter of 988, granting on long lease certain lands «in loco Cerreto» belonging to the monastery of San Silvestro. A pilgrim road passed this way, and between the Olai farmstead and the middle of the village there was a hospitale of the Holy Sepulchre, one of those shelters for pilgrims that dotted the roads to Rome: in 1905 a stretch of its roadbed came to light, with the cobbles, the stone slabs and the flags. Of the monastery and the castle nothing is left, but the names of the lanes still remember them — the castle stood at the end of what people call the lane of the Torrione — and in via Roma, on a house, the prior's arms of the Mortariense order of Santa Croce are still there.

The church of San Pietro was rebuilt from 1764 over the old one, and the walls tell the whole story: courses of Roman brick, medieval masonry, fifteenth-century rebuildings. Inside, the prior's room above the sacristy is preserved, and a red marble stoup with the suffering Christ. At Christmas the village fills up for the motorised crib: more than two hundred moving figures, plays of light and falling water, and people come to see it from all over the Lomellina.