Retorbido

According to local tradition, Bertoldo was born here. The cunning peasant of the popular anecdotes and of Giulio Cesare Croce's book is said to have come into the world in a hamlet of Retorbido called Casa Bertuggia, and the village holds on to it: at the Sagra del Polentone, held for more than a century on the second Sunday of March, the joking dialogue between Bertoldo and king Alboin is staged, updated each year to the politics of the moment, and then polenta and small salami are handed out free to everyone. Since humanist times, moreover, people have wanted to recognise in Retorbido the ancient Ligurian city of Litubium, named by Livy: the dialect name rturbi means literally «muddy stream», and the geography fits, but there is no conclusive proof, because the Roman finds that would link the two ages are missing.

Water, in any case, the village has had rather too much of. The Rile torrent used to run through the built-up area and its floods were a constant danger: one in 1815 killed several people, another came in 1863, and only in 1894 was it diverted outside the centre, to a design by the engineers Meardi and Garrone. Another water, on the contrary, made Retorbido's fortune: the sulphurous springs, known since the Renaissance and described in a treatise of 1577 by the Pavian physician Teodoro Guainerio. The baths had their best years in the nineteenth century, with a modern establishment; they closed at the beginning of the twentieth, above all because of the poor connections with Voghera, and for the village it was a very hard blow.