Sant'Alessio con Vialone

The name is a sum: Sant'Alessio and Vialone, the second from vicalone, out of the Latin vicalis, meaning a group of houses. Vialone was a comune of its own until 1841, when it was absorbed; the double name dates from 1863. And it is that half of the name that has travelled: Vialone rice, whose discovery in 1904 the village still celebrates with a festival in early September, carries the name of a hamlet of the Pavia lowland around the world.

The place appears as Sancto Alexjo as early as the twelfth century. It belonged to the Canepanova of Pavia, from whom the Beccaria took it — castle included — in the fourteenth; a branch of the family took its name from the village, later Beccaria di Montebello. When that branch died out, in 1629, Sant'Alessio was never enfeoffed again: since then it has had no lord. In the meantime it had been sacked by the Swiss in 1512 and by the French in 1527; in the eighteenth century it took in the small comuni of Lossano and Guardabiate; in 1929 it was suppressed and joined to Lardirago, and it took its autonomy back in 1947. Around the castle today there is a wildlife park that reconstructs not only the habitats of the Po plain but pieces of rainforest as well.