Mezzanino

Mezzanino changed bank without moving. The village probably arose on a small island of the Po, and that is exactly what the place name mezzana means, a word common all along the river. In the seventeenth century it certainly already lay in the Oltrepò, on the right bank, but earlier it was north of the river, and until the end of the eighteenth century it was administratively joined to the Siccomario, which is on the other side: what moved was not the village, it was the Po. Today the comune looks onto the mouth of the Ticino and is part of the regional park of the Ticino valley.

The river has also taken houses away. In the fifteenth century Mezzanino appears together with Tovo, which was one of the most important crossing points of the Po in the Pavia country: of Tovo there survives today the name of a farmstead in the comune of Verrua Po, and not even in the right place. From the same period comes the first mention of Venesia, a place of no small size near the water: worn down by the floods, it was annexed to Mezzanino in the Napoleonic age and in 1890 a flood destroyed it altogether. The comune of Castellazzo Busca was abolished too, in 1818, and corresponds to today's hamlet of Busca; beside it, after the building of the Becca bridge, the new settlement of Tornello grew up.