Robecco Pavese

The name of this village is the description of a job. Robecco grew up in the Middle Ages in an area that had been centuriated by the countryside of Roman Clastidium, that is Casteggio, and the first notices of it are from the thirteenth century, when it was a dependency of an older village called Salabolonum. The word behind the name is probably Lombard: rebechum meant a small castle, the outpost of a larger one. The village, in short, was called after the function it performed — the forward post of somebody else. Then Salabolonum declined and disappeared, and the outpost became the main village.

What the outpost did afterwards follows on. In the fourteenth century the Beccaria of Pavia fortified its castle, and from there they could control the comune of Casteggio — that is, precisely the place this village had been an appendage of. In the following century the same Beccaria made Robecco an autonomous fief, and they managed to keep it despite the fierce quarrels between Castellino and Fiorello Beccaria of Robecco and the Visconti. The fief stayed with the Beccaria until the seventeen hundreds, when it passed to the Balbi and finally to the Belcredi, just before the feudal regime came to an end, in 1797. Today Robecco Pavese is a village of the plain of the Oltrepò Pavese, by the Rile San Zeno torrent; its arms and banner were granted in 1997.