Pizzale

Pizzale was under the lordship of a family that took its name from the place, the de Pizzalibus, and its history is Voghera's: with Voghera it entered the territory of Pavia in 1164, and with Voghera it passed from the Beccaria to the Dal Verme and the Dal Pozzo, until 1770, when the feudal regime came to an end. But of all the many villages of that fief, which before the seventeenth century had been comuni of their own and were then absorbed by the chief town, Pizzale is the only one that kept its communal autonomy.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century the territory of Porana was joined to it, and Porana came from another world: it belonged to the pieve of Casteggio, in the diocese of Piacenza, while Pizzale was in the pieve of Voghera, diocese of Tortona. It was a very ancient possession of the church of Pavia, said to have been given to it by bishop Crispinus — and the parish there is dedicated to Saint Crispin, which is the trace of that story. Porana was already a comune in the thirteenth century and had a castle: it was destroyed by order of Castellino Beccaria, lord of Voghera, during the struggles with the Visconti, to whom Porana had probably remained faithful.