Montù Beccaria

In 1164, in the diploma by which Frederick Barbarossa granted most of the Oltrepò to the city of Pavia, the village is still called Monte Acuto: the castle stands on a rise that dominates the borough and that here, without mincing words, they call Castellazzo. The men of Piacenza, at war with Pavia, destroyed it in 1216, and it was rebuilt; towards the end of that century it had become one of the chief strongholds of the Beccaria, the family that left the village its second name.

In 1591 that branch of the Beccaria died out with count Aureliano, and then castle and fief went separate ways: the castle passed by inheritance to the Barnabite fathers, who were for a long time the largest landowners in the comune, while the fief was confiscated and put up for sale — to the Salimbene in 1609, to the Bellone in 1665, to the Martin in 1786, until the abolition of feudalism. On the coat of arms, granted in 1884, there are the castle, the vine and the wheat, and the thirteen red hills of the Beccaria: thirteen like the family's victories, or like the castles it owned in the Ticino countryside.