Corteolona e Genzone

From Corteolona, in 825, the emperor Lothair I issued the capitulary that made Pavia the principal seat of studies in northern Italy: the act from which, centuries later, the university would grow. This was no ordinary place: on the Strada Regina that joined Pavia to Piacenza and the Via Emilia, the Curtis Olumna was a royal court where the Lombard kings and then the Frankish ones resided, when Pavia was the capital of the kingdom. Passed to the monastery of San Salvatore in Pavia, by the fifteenth century Corteolona was the administrative seat of the vicariate of Belgioioso, and at the end of that century Ercole d'Este was its count; the fief stayed with the cadet branch of the Este di San Martino from 1490 to 1752, then passed by marriage to the princes Barbiano di Belgioioso.

Genzone, the other half of the name, arrived much later: the present municipality has existed since 1 January 2016, when the two villages merged. The coat of arms, granted in 2017, is a heraldic compromise made so as to wrong nobody: from Corteolona come the golden crown, the two crossed swords and the scales — the signs of the court and of royal justice — and from Genzone the seven ears of wheat, the two stars and the wavy band of water. A new municipality, then, that carries on its shield the memory of an imperial court and that of a village of fields.