Roncaro

This village was for centuries a land of monasteries. It appears as Runcure or Runcore in documents of the twelfth century, and its lands were the property of various monasteries of Pavia, in particular that of San Tommaso: not a lord with a castle, then, but religious houses of the city that from the city administered fields a dozen kilometres away. Roncaro was part of the Campagna Sottana of Pavia, the belt of plain east of the city between the Olona and the southern Lambro, and from 1475 it entered the fief of Vistarino, whose lords were the Giorgi of Pavia.

The story of its feudal lords can be read entirely in the name of the neighbouring fief. Vistarino, known as Vestarino since the twelfth century, belonged in the fourteenth to the Beccaria of Pavia, of the branch of messer Fiorello; in the sixteenth century that branch merged by marriage into the Giorgi di Soriasco, and when these too died out, in the seventeenth, their relatives the Giorgi of Pavia bought the fiefs that had been the Beccaria's and were named counts of Vistarino — since then they are called Giorgi di Vistarino, that is, they carry the name of the village they had bought. In 1475, the year in which Roncaro entered that fief, the Bassa Pavese was being redistributed elsewhere too: it is the same year in which the vicariate of Belgioioso, a little further east, was enfeoffed to a cadet branch of the Este. The coat of arms and the banner of Roncaro are far more recent: they were granted by decree of the President of the Republic of 22 April 1985.