Torre d'Isola

At Santa Sofia, so the legend goes, the ancients tried to found Pavia: what they built by day they found destroyed the next morning, and in the end they gave up. The place, a terrace that stands twenty metres above the Ticino, later served as a military port defending the city, and in the years 773 and 774 Charlemagne camped here while besieging Pavia: tradition holds that the chapel of Santa Sofia was raised by the hands of the Frankish king and his paladins themselves. Rebuilt at the end of the sixteenth century, in the late nineteen-fifties it risked ending up in the river because erosion was eating away its foundations; restored in the nineties, it now hosts exhibitions and weddings.

The municipality's name, on the other hand, speaks of a tower and an island: it appears as Ynsula in the twelfth century and as Turris Insulae in the fifteenth, and a deed of 1456 names a tower inside a farm belonging to the monastery of San Lanfranco — perhaps that very one. "Island" here means land between two waters, and the Ticino is a step away. From the fifteenth century the village belonged to the Botta, later Botta Adorno, the same family that held Lungavilla: they carried out important irrigation works and in the eighteenth century built the villa that was for a long time the only inhabited building in Torre d'Isola, with its little church of Santa Maria della Neve, consecrated in 1706. Today's municipality grew by accretion: Santa Sofia in 1841, San Varese and Cassine Tolentine in 1871.