Codevilla

For eight centuries it was the upper village that ruled, and then the parts were reversed. Mondondone, which stands on a hill above today's main village, is known from 997: it lay in the county of Tortona and belonged largely to the monastery of the Senatore in Pavia; in 1164 the city of Pavia acquired its political dominion as well and made it the seat of one of the squadre, that is of the podesterie into which the territory was divided — but the monastery kept the lordship and went on appointing the podestà. In 1412 the squadra of Mondondone, which included Codevilla and other villages, was granted in fief to Rainaldo Beccaria; when that branch died out, in 1610 the fief passed to the counts Rovida of Pavia, who held it until feudalism was abolished. Meanwhile, at the foot of the hill, Codevilla had become from at least the fifteen-hundreds the more important centre and one of the most populous of the district; and in 1814 it became the municipal seat, while Mondondone was reduced to a hamlet. Its millennium was celebrated in 1997.

The name of Codevilla tells of a move. The town grew in the late Middle Ages not far from the old pieve of San Martino della Luta, known from the twelfth century and finally fallen in the sixteen-hundreds: when the old village beside the pieve was abandoned, the new settlement found itself being cò ad la vila, that is at the head of the villa, of the earlier village — and from that comes Codevilla. The municipal coat of arms brings together the three things that count: the eagle of the feudal families, the ears of wheat and the grapes of the fields, and the crozier, which recalls that the town was long a fief of the bishop of Tortona. Local legends tell, finally, that at Casareggio stood the summer dwelling where the Lombard king Alboin is said to have stayed during the siege of Pavia, and that there took place his meetings with the peasant Bertoldo.