Miradolo Terme

The salt springs of Miradolo changed trade. Before the year one thousand they served to preserve food: it was the salt, not the cure, that made this ground valuable. In 1511 Louis XII of France, come down into Italy to take the Duchy of Milan, officially recognised the therapeutic use of those same waters, and with that recognition the first spa effectively came into being. The municipality's name arrived much later, in 1938, when Terme was added to the old Miradolo; since 1912 the hydrotherapy complex of the Saline had already existed, founded under the patronage of the University of Pavia.

Three thousand seven hundred and ninety-two inhabitants in the province of Pavia, at the foot of the hill of San Colombano. The name appears for the first time in the will of archbishop Ariberto da Intimiano, of 1034, as Castrum Miradolium; the hill beside the village is still called Baltré in dialect, perhaps from the baltresca, the wooden tower used in medieval warfare. On that hill, between 1530 and 1537, the little church of Santa Maria in monte Aureto was built, raised with the rubble of the castle.