Gerenzago

The castle of this village belonged to a college of students. Gerenzago appears in the twelfth century as Gerençagus or Zerenzagus, and it is named in the diploma of 1164 with which emperor Frederick I assigned to Pavia the jurisdiction over the Lomellina, the Oltrepò and some places of the Pavese that perhaps had not always belonged to it. It was part of the Campagna Sottana of Pavia, was a lordship of the Capitani di Villanterio and from the fifteenth century entered the squadra of the Vicariate of Belgioioso, which had Corteolona as its head town and was enfeoffed from 1475 to a cadet branch of the Este, merged by marriage in 1757 into the princes Barbiano di Belgioioso. The castle that stands in the comune's coat of arms, granted on 21 March 1997, is however the one that belonged to the Collegio Ghislieri of Pavia, the university college founded in 1567 by pope Pius V and still one of the oldest in Italy: a college of students that owned a fortified farmstead in the middle of the plain.

In the second half of the last century that castle stopped being a garrison and was turned to agricultural use, which is the ordinary destiny of hundreds of buildings like it in the Bassa Pavese: a courtyard for tractors instead of soldiers. The motto the comune put on its banner is in Latin and translates as «strength of spirit defeats fear». The church is ancient too: for both church and castle there are historical mentions attesting their existence already at the end of the early Middle Ages, and over the centuries, with money from the curia and from the village, the parish complex grew until it took in the priest's house and an oratory of considerable size. Until the last century the economy rested on farming, crafts, trade and building; of those activities, today, only a few historic ones remain.