San Cipriano Po

San Cipriano is known from the 10th century, when it belonged to the church of San Giovanni Domnarum in Pavia, and shortly afterwards it passed, with Stradella and Portalbera, under the lordship of the bishop of Pavia. Then, for reasons the sources do not make clear, it found itself divided: about three quarters of the village lay in the fief of Broni, from 1536 held by the Arrigoni counts of Milan, and a quarter in that of Stradella, which stayed with the bishop's table. It was a single comune with two jurisdictions: the episcopal part, called the Corte di San Cipriano, to the south, where the church is; the Broni part to the north. That ended in 1797, with the abolition of feudalism, but the village can still be seen as two clusters of houses, one for each part.

In the Napoleonic period Buffalora and Coste were joined to the comune; until then they had been comuni of their own, and they too belonged to the two fiefs that divided San Cipriano, Buffalora to the county of Broni and Coste to the episcopal fief of Stradella and Portalbera: the same partition was repeated all around, in miniature. The arms the comune uses have never had a decree of grant; the blue band that crosses them is the Po, on whose right bank the village stands, in the plain of the Oltrepò Pavese. In the local dialect it is San Spariän.