Rocca de' Giorgi

The village has changed its name as many times as it has had masters. Fortified in the early Middle Ages, perhaps by a lord named Aimerico, it was Rocca di Aimerico when in 1164 it passed to Pavia; then Rocca Campesana under the Campeggi, then Roccafirella after the Beccaria who rebuilt it, and at last, the Beccaria having died out in 1629, Rocca de' Giorgi after the counts who bought it — whose descendants are still the largest landowners here.

On the last day of 1944 a German patrol came here on a round-up and killed four men: two taken on the spot, one brought along as a hostage from a nearby village, and finally, at a farmstead, a young southerner who had stayed on as a farmhand after the armistice. Today Rocca de' Giorgi is the Italian comune with the highest proportion of foreign residents: more than a third of its people.