Suardi

This village of the southern Lomellina is the second attempt. The first was called Borgofranco and had not grown by itself: the comune of Pavia had it built between 1192 and 1205, to a preset plan, to control a strategic ford of the Po and to compete with the jurisdiction of the bishop of Pavia over Bassignana. What came out was a great rectangle with orthogonal streets, ringed by a moat, of almost city-like dimensions, and in the eighteenth century it was still a large centre. The flaw was the river. The Po threatened and devastated it several times, and several times the town was rebuilt, until in 1808 it was abandoned for good. The people then moved and made the village again around the old monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie, this time with no orderly plan at all: that is, the way a village grows when nobody designs it.

The name changed as well. Until 1863 the comune was still called Borgofranco, then it took the name of the nearby hamlet Santa Maria di Suardi, which in turn took it from a Bergamasque family that owned property there. And according to the source that surname comes from an ancient warrior people, the Swardesi, that is the sword-bearers, where the double v pronounced as a u turned in time into the letter one reads today: from there the family's name, then the comune's, and finally the inhabitants', who call themselves suardesi. A geographical oddity is worth adding: Borgofranco was the outpost of Bassignana north of the Po, so much so that it was also called Borgo di Bassignana — and Bassignana, though standing on the other bank, belonged politically to the Lomellina.