Mezzana Rabattone

Mezzana Rabattone is a village the river has moved. It lies in the lower Lomellina, just above the point where the Terdoppio enters the Po, and here the Po has always made a bend so wide that it went to touch the other watercourse: the village found itself surrounded by the two waters more than once, and that is why it is called Mezzana, the land in the middle. The place is already spoken of in a lawsuit of 1195, when two judges were called to arbitrate the ownership of an island of the Po which a witness said had formed a few days after the death of bishop Pietro V, that is, in 1180. Then the name walks through the papers — Mezzano della Scavicata, the bishop's Mezzano, Mezzana di Arbatò — and only in the eighteenth century does it reach the present one. Rabattone, some say, comes from dialect: the village has been rabatato more than once, that is, hurled from one bank to the other, by the river and by men.

The odd thing is that the same word describes the rest as well. The Napoleonic decree set the borders of the provinces on the Po, and Mezzana ended up in the Oltrepò, in the district of Voghera. Then the people of Zinasco Vecchio, who at every flood saw the two joined rivers coming down on them, sent a petition to Turin: king Charles Felix and the marquis Mandelli, who owned land in these parts, had the bend cut through with a straight channel, and the cut moved Mezzana into the Lomellina without the village stirring a metre. What remained was the problem of reaching it: first a wooden bridge over the Terdoppio and a passage along the top of the embankment, then, around 1860, a real road from Zinasco Vecchio. And the parish stayed in the diocese of Tortona until 14 December 2023.