San Damiano al Colle

The village runs in a horseshoe along the ridge of a hill of the Oltrepò, towards the border with the Piacenza country, and is made of four nuclei; a fifth, Mondonico, lies almost five kilometres away and was for centuries an independent comune and a rival of this one, until at the beginning of the nineteenth century it was joined to it. Mondonico was already known in the eleventh century, and in 1282 the monastery of San Pietro in Verzolo took possession there of wide lands and of the church of San Lorenzo de Camporellis.

San Damiano belonged to the feudal lordship of the bishop of Pavia, as part of the fief of Portalbera, until 1677. Then the fief was broken up, and this village was sold to count Galeazzo Mandelli of Pavia at a price reckoned by hearth: sixty lire for each fuoco, that is for each family, and the families were thirty-six. With the treaty of Worms of 1743 it passed to the House of Savoy, and from then on its story is a list of reassignments — the district of Voghera, the canton of Broni, the department of Marengo, that of Genoa, the mandamento of Montù Beccaria — until the annexation of Lombardy, in 1859, brought it into the province of Pavia. Until 1863 it was called simply San Damiano: the al Colle dates from then. At the first census of the Kingdom it had one thousand four hundred and thirty-eight inhabitants: today they are half that.