Tromello

On the twenty-seventh of May 2019 Tromello became the first Italian municipality to elect a transgender mayor, the lawyer Gianmarco Negri. Ten years earlier the village had made the news for a very different reason: on the fourth of December 2009 dangerous cracks opened in the bell tower of the parish church of San Martino, and the next day the adjoining care home and 10 houses were evacuated, the residents moved into the middle school gymnasium and the area declared a red zone. The evacuation order was lifted on the sixth of March 2010, but the church stayed shut for more than four years and reopened only on the thirtieth of March 2014.

Three thousand eight hundred and twenty-eight inhabitants in the province of Pavia, in the central Lomellina, on the right bank of the Terdoppio; the historic route of the Via Francigena crosses the village, coming from Mortara and going on towards Garlasco. In 1014 the emperor Henry II granted Tromello to the monastery of San Felice; in 1475 duke Galeazzo Maria Sforza gave the fief to his own court musician, one Cordier, and later Ludovico il Moro made a present of the village mill to his wife Beatrice d'Este.