San Martino Siccomario

San Martino Siccomario stands on the right bank of the Ticino, at the gates of Pavia, to which it is by now joined: all that still separates it from the city is the Gravellone canal, once a side branch of the river. In the documents the village was called Terra Arsa, a name that appears in 909, and for centuries it was San Martino in Terra Arsa; the Siccomario was added to it only in the middle of the eighteenth century. A medieval legend had it that Saint Martin of Tours lived here as a child, and already in the time of Charlemagne there stood a hospice dedicated to the saint, which the emperor placed under the jurisdiction of the monastery of Tours.

That canal was a state border for more than a century. In 1743 the Siccomario passed to the House of Savoy while Pavia remained Austrian, and the Gravellone divided the two dominions until 1859. It was there, in 1848, that Charles Albert handed the Tricolore to his army, and it has been the national flag ever since. On the coat of arms the ears of wheat stand between two wavy bands, the Po and the Ticino, and the red and the silver come from the arms of Pavia.