Landriano

Landriano is a municipality in the province of Pavia, in Lombardy, on the left bank of the southern Lambro river, which here forms a small island holding the old castle. It is documented from the eleventh century, when it belonged to the monastery of Sant'Ambrogio in Milan; its local lords took from it the name Capitani di Landriano, later Landriani. During the struggle between Emperor Frederick Barbarossa and the Lombard communes, Landriano hosted Barbarossa himself several times, and he had the castle and the village rebuilt into a proper fortified town. In 1396 Gian Galeazzo Visconti gave much of the local farmland to the Certosa di Pavia, and in 1522 the Taverna family of Milan became its counts until feudalism was abolished.

On 21 June 1529 Landriano was the site of the battle that ended the War of the League of Cognac and Francis I's ambitions on Milan: the unpaid Landsknechts refused to fight alongside the French, who were routed. After the Second World War a resident found a German-made iron halberd on the bank of the Lambro, probably left by one of those soldiers. In 1897 workers digging a sand quarry on the riverbank uncovered a buckle, earrings and a cameo in gold and garnets attributed to Ostrogothic craftsmanship, now held in Milan's civic archaeological museum. In 1872 the municipality absorbed Pairana, documented from the ninth century and once a fief of the Bascapè family.