Silvano Pietra

In the tenth century this land was part of the royal court of Corana, which the empress Adelaide gave to the monastery of San Salvatore in Pavia; before that it had been crown property — a king had granted it to his mother — and it appears among the appurtenances of Corana in an inventory of the imperial estates. But Silvano, under that name, did not yet exist: what stood here was the castle of the Armentaria, which today is a farmstead called Armentera. The name appears from the twelfth century; then, when in 1468 the Bottigella of Pavia received the fief and became its great landowners, the village came to be called Silvano Bottigella. In 1528, the Bottigella having lost the fief, it passed to Brunorio Pietra, a ducal minister, and stayed with his descendants until feudalism was abolished in 1797: the old surname was replaced by his. Silvano Pietra is a village that has borne, one after the other, the surnames of two owners.

In the central square stands the castle dated 1329, begun by the Beccaria, who at the start of that century were the lords of the place. It had three towers, the tallest of thirty-five metres, and in its early years it was used as a prison: the proof is a word cut into the original fourteenth-century wall, Prijonie. Only the south wing of that castle survives, and on its front one can still make out the traces of the drawbridge, the single-light windows and the arches, both pointed and round; inside are frescoes running from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century, whose authorship experts are still weighing. The main street is unusually wide, and leaves room to look at the rest: a Romanesque church with its frescoes, houses of the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in bare brick still pointed with white lime, a baroque sanctuary, a neo-Gothic farm and a Liberty house.