A nineteenth-century historian of the Lomellina described its people as good, hard-working, honest and educated, with one marked fault: going to law over property. And it is precisely in the sentence of one of those suits, dated the tenth of July 789, that a place called Orevanum appears for the first time. Two explanations compete for the name: Aula Laevorum, the court of the Levi, a Ligurian people of a thousand years before Christ, or the Celtic word for the plain in the valley. In 1164 Frederick Barbarossa granted the fief to Uberto de' Olevano, admiral and jurist of the empire, whose family held the property for seven centuries. The present name dates from 1863, to tell the village apart from the two other Olevano in Italy.
The castle was built around the year one thousand against Hungarian raids, and since then it has been knocked down and rebuilt again and again: by Barbarossa in the twelfth century, by Facino Cane in 1404, by French troops in the sixteenth century, by the Austro-Piedmontese in 1745. Then, in 1758, Gerolamo III de Olevano told his own architect, Lorenzo Cassani of Pavia, to turn it into a comfortable house: following the English fashion of the day, the poetry of ruins, Cassani blended the medieval buildings with the new work. So the complex today is an eighteenth-century villa on its southern side and remains a fortress on the northern one, with a tower twenty-three metres high and swallow-tail battlements.
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📅 Every year, on the fourth Sunday of October
On the fourth Sunday of October Olevano di Lomellina, a municipality of 783 inhabitants in the province of Pavia, celebrates its patron San Michele Arcangelo (Saint Michael the Archangel).
Straight-line distances from the town centre. Tap a point to open its page.
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
Outside Olevano di Lomellina, but an easy day trip away.
