Val di Nizza

The comune carries the name of the valley and not of a village, and the reason is that none of its villages won. The main centre of this area, for centuries, was Oramala, whose castle was one of the most important fortresses of the Malaspina; but once the lordship ended the place declined, and in 1817 the comune of Oramala was aggregated to Val di Nizza. The other ancient nucleus was Sant'Albano, with its court and the monastic pieve of San Paolo di Nizza, which belonged to the abbey of San Colombano at Bobbio: after the unification of Italy it took the name Sant'Albano di Bobbio, and in 1929 it too was suppressed and joined on. Three separate comuni — Valdinizza, Oramala and Sant'Albano — had survived even the abolition of feudalism in 1797, and ended up inside a single one, which is a comune sparso: without a capoluogo, named after the stream that runs through it.

Whose valley this was, on the other hand, is known perfectly well. In 1014, with the creation of the diocese of Bobbio, it became a fief of that bishop, who in turn enfeoffed it to branches of the Malaspina; the place lay on the border between the spheres of influence of the bishoprics of Tortona and Bobbio, and in 1029 the marquis Ugo of the Obertenghi line bought it, from whom by inheritance it passed to his nephew Alberto, the very forefather of the Malaspina. The family then divided and subdivided again: a branch of Oramala was born, later called of Godiasco, which in its turn split into five. In the seventeenth century the whole area lay within the marquisate of Godiasco, one of the chief separate and widely autonomous jurisdictions attached to the Oltrepò, and it was run in consortium by the innumerable ramifications of the house. Culturally the valley does not look to Pavia but to the Four Provinces, where the ruling instrument is the Apennine piffero, accompanied by the accordion and once by the müsa, the bagpipe of these mountains.