Santa Giuletta

For twenty years Santa Giuletta made dolls. It began in 1933, when the Fata company — bought a few years earlier by two cousins born in the village, Teresio Garbagna and Luigi Porcellana — moved a small part of its production here: the first «cheap dolls» were made in a room on the first floor of palazzo Giandolini, where seven women worked. Their bodies were cloth stuffed with rivia, the dialect word for thin wood shavings, their heads pressed cardboard, their eyes and mouths painted on. In 1936 Fata brought its whole production here, and from the nineteen-forties others were born one after another: Liala in 1945, Diva in 1949, and then Silba, Alba, Giulietta, Lilly, Miva, Farida, Rossella, Liana, Milena, Monel. Since 2005 a civic museum has gathered those dolls together with moulds, catalogues and labels.

The other thing the village gave away is its stone. From Monte Zavo, the highest point of the territory, came part of the sandstone used to build sections of San Michele Maggiore, of San Pietro in Ciel d'Oro and of the Certosa di Pavia. Santa Giuletta, meanwhile, has always been two villages: the Castello up on the hill and the Villa at its foot, with the church planted halfway between them. By 1631 the Villa had already overtaken the Castello — thirty-two families against twenty-five — and in the nineteen-fifties the town hall moved down there for good.