Inverno e Monteleone

The name of this comune is double, and neither half says what it seems to say. Inverno has nothing to do with winter: an erudite tradition traced it, without foundation, to the Hiberna Castra, the Roman winter camps, while in the tenth century the village was a dependency of the ancient abbey of Santa Cristina, the nearby monastery of Lombard foundation. At the time of the Crusades it passed to the order of the Hospitallers, later Knights of Malta, who had the castle built there; on them the village depended feudally until 1786, although the census of 1751 gives it as a fief of the marquises of Origo. Monteleone, for its part, never had lions: it is documented as Montis Luponi in 999, then as Montis Olivonis in 1374 and Mons Oleonis in 1428, and what grew on these slopes, at the foot of the hill of San Colombano, was the olive.

On Monteleone depended three very small comuni, Cantelma, Gatta and Ca del Rho; in 1750 it was enfeoffed to the Este. In 1863 it changed its name to Monteleone sui Colli Pavesi, and a few years later it lost everything: the comune was suppressed and aggregated to Inverno. It took almost a century for the name to come back: only in 1961 did the comune take its present denomination of Inverno e Monteleone. The coat of arms, granted by decree of the President of the Republic of 27 October 1962, keeps the two halves side by side and draws the name as it sounds today: in the first partition the mount and the lion, which together make Monteleone; in the second the stylised figure of the castle of Inverno, dominated by the symbol of the Order of Malta.