Montecalvo Versiggia

Montecalvo Versiggia has no officially recognised coat of arms: in its place it uses a logo, a stylised wine glass in two shades of green. For a comune of the Oltrepò Pavese, lying in the valley of the Versa torrent, this is not a graphic whim but an exact statement of what keeps the village standing; and to confirm it there is also a corkscrew museum. The castle, meanwhile, is still in its place, on top of the hill at three hundred and sixty metres: it was part of the defensive system of the val Versa, of which it was an important strongpoint together with the tower of Soriasco, Golferenzo, Mondonico and the rocca of Montalino. The town hall, though, is not up there: it is down at Crocetta, at the foot of the hill.

Montecalvo is among the places named in 1164 in the diploma by which Frederick I granted the city of Pavia dominion over the Oltrepò, and those names probably correspond to the local lordships that had a castle. In the fourteenth century the Beccaria took the lordship; in the fifteenth it passed to the Beccaria of Montebello, under whom the county of Montecalvo also included Golferenzo, Volpara and Rocca de' Giorgi. When the Beccaria died out in 1629 the fief was separated from Montebello and sold to the Dal Pozzo, who also bought the neighbouring fief of Soriasco; but the Dal Pozzo ran into financial trouble and had to break up what they had, so that in 1691 Montecalvo, with Golferenzo and Volpara but without Rocca de' Giorgi, was sold to the Belcredi, a different branch of the house of the lords of Montalto. They held it until the end of feudalism, in 1797. It is a small story, but it says clearly what a fief was: not a land somebody owned forever, but an asset that could be divided, sold and put together again according to the debts of whoever held it.