Marcignago

The name Marcignago is Roman: it is a predial, that is the name of an estate, formed on the gentile name Marcinius; the village is documented from 1181, belonged to the Campagna Soprana of Pavia and was the seat of a squadra, a podesteria. The fief, which included Giovenzano too, was bought in 1539 by Ludovico Pallavicino and stayed with his descendants until the line died out in 1717; it then passed to the Della Puella and in 1752 to a branch of the Visconti. The inhabitants had a nickname, "quatordas e vutanta", fourteen and eighty: what it was supposed to mean is no longer known, but in the village it has always been taken as an insult.

The real leap, though, is that of 1757, and it can be read in the numbers: in 1751 Marcignago had a little over three hundred and fifty inhabitants, in 1780 it had more than a thousand. In between lies the year when five suppressed municipalities were joined to it: Brusada, which belonged entirely to the monastery of the Certosa di Pavia; Cassina di Mezzo; Calignago, which appears as Calignagum in documents of the twelfth century; Molino Vecchio, which was part of the fief of Trivolzio; and Divisa, perhaps the head of a podesteria in the Middle Ages, a fief of the Sfondrati and then of the Serbelloni. The parish church of Sant'Agata, which at first depended on the pieve of Trivolzio, has a presbytery of 1742 and a nave of 1830.