Spessa

In the twelfth century the place is written Spexa, and in the following century it already appears divided in two: Spixia Suprana and Spixia Subtana, the upper one and the lower one. Today's Spessa is probably the lower, while the upper would be what is now the hamlet of Sostegno. The village was part of the Campagna Sottana of Pavia and was a fief of the Fiamberti of Pavia; from 1475 it was taken into the fief of Belgioioso, which belonged to the Barbiano. It stands on the left bank of the Po, just upstream of the point where the Olona comes into the river, in a flat country of embankments and poplars.

Then there was a third one. It was called Spessetta Balbiani — little Spessa — and it was a comune of its own: it appears among the comuni of the districts of Pavia at the beginning of the eighteen hundreds and was an autonomous comune from 1816 to 1859; in the course of that century it was aggregated to Spessa. The comune of today, in short, is the sum of names that for centuries served to tell one place from another: the upper, the lower and the little one, each with its own church and its own boundaries, all of them ending up in a single line on the sign at the entrance to the village.