Corvino San Quirico

The name is said to be Ligurian: according to monsignor Clelio Golgi it comes from car-ven, «mountain valley», and indeed the hamlet of Valle Straggini, which old documents call Corvino Vecchio, lies inside a natural amphitheatre. If the identification with a court called Carvina is right, the place appears in the tenth century among the possessions of the monastery of San Salvatore in Pavia. The second half of the name has a longer story than the village is big: saint Quiricus was martyred in Syria together with his mother Julitta around 304, during the persecution of Diocletian, and tradition holds that his cult took root here at the beginning of the fifth century, when saint Amadour, bishop of Autun, passed along the via Romea carrying to France the remains of the two saints, which he had found at Antioch.

Under Pavia from 1164, Corvino belonged to the district of Casteggio, but in the fifteenth century it was separated from it: in 1470 it was enfeoffed to Guido Antonio Arcimboldi and in 1504 to the Mezzabarba of Pavia, who took the title of counts of Corvino and held the fief until their line died out in the seventeen hundreds — the last feudal count was Johann Emanuel Joseph von Khevenhüller-Metsch, husband of the last of the Mezzabarba. Before that century the comune had already absorbed the ancient comune of Castagnino, of which today not even the site is known. From the second half of the nineteenth century, at the foot of the hills and along the edge of the old Padana Inferiore road, the hamlet of Fumo began instead to grow: in the following century it outgrew the main village itself.