Cigognola

Here a castle was the reward for an informer. Cigognola appears in the Frederician diploma of 1164, the one that placed the northern and central Oltrepò under the jurisdiction of Pavia: a sign that it was already a fortified place with a dominus loci of its own. It was then a lordship of the Sannazzaro, the powerful Pavian house that led the Guelph party in the Oltrepò, represented here by one of its main branches, the de Cigognola. In 1406 they were ousted by the intrigues of the Beccaria of Pavia, who seized the fief; but in 1415 the Beccaria turned out to be involved in a conspiracy against Filippo Maria Visconti, count of Pavia and duke of Milan, the fief was confiscated and granted to the man who had uncovered the plot, Giorgio Aicardi. With the land came a privilege that was worth more: the Visconti allowed him and his own to take their surname. So were born the Visconti Aicardi, also called Visconti Scaramuzza from Giorgio's nickname.

On paper the Aicardi were due about half the fief of Broni, including the lands usurped from the Sannazzaro; in fact their descendants kept the nominal title of counts of Broni and Cigognola with its distant dependencies of Canevino and Albaredo Arnaboldi, on which the Sannazzaro went on pressing claims until they were quieted with a money indemnity. The Visconti Aicardi Scaramuzza held the place until their line died out, in the eighteenth century; then it passed to Barbara d'Adda and to her son Alberico XII Barbiano di Belgioioso, the last feudal lord, because feudalism was abolished in 1797. The castle, begun at the start of the thirteenth century, crowns the hill above the village and has never stopped changing hands: bought in the Napoleonic age by the Gazzaniga, it passed by inheritance to the Arnaboldi-Gazzaniga and to the present owners, the Brichetto-Arnaboldi. Below, the vineyards make Bonarda, Buttafuoco and Sangue di Giuda; and the «vasca», the basin dug in 1948 to irrigate them and reclaimed in the two thousands, is today a little lake for anglers.