Rosasco

On the front of the town hall there is a plaque recording the birth here of Ferdinando Brusotti, a physicist who lived between 1839 and 1899 and who, the plaque says, came before Thomas Edison in the invention of the electric lamp: his patent is dated the thirtieth of November 1877 and is kept at the university of Pavia. Inside the same building, in the council chamber, hang six small panels on a gold ground of the thirteen and fourteen hundreds — a Saint Thomas, a Saint Dominic, a Saint Benedict, a Saint Catherine of Alexandria, a Saint Clare and three martyr saints.

The first document concerning Rosasco and its castle is the grant that Otto the first made in 977 to the bishop of Pavia; and that lordship lasted, through sub-infeudations and usurpations by laymen, until the abolition of feudalism in 1797 — eight centuries with the same owner, and the owner was a bishop. The castle, on the other hand, was gravely damaged by French troops in 1636 and almost entirely destroyed by the Piedmontese in 1643, during the war of Monferrato; and after that the village ate it: pieces of the old fortifications can be recognised in the parish church and in the houses of the central nucleus, and the remains of one tower are built into the apse of the church. What is left standing is the entrance tower, which had a drawbridge and a postern for those on foot, and which people call the tower of the consegno because in Napoleonic times it was the town hall and the young men were enrolled there; a long stretch of wall whose masonry looks earlier than the year 900; and the main tower, square, twenty-three metres high, with Ghibelline merlons.