In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries this fief changed hands the way a house does: from the Beccaria to Cicco Simonetta, the Sforza minister, in 1470; then confiscated and sold to a man from Ferrara; then, with the French, to cardinal d'Amboise, who resold it to the minister Bergonzo Botta; then to the Visconti, whose branch here died out in 1564; and finally, in 1574, to Giovanni Agostino Litta, first count of Valle, whose family kept it until feudalism was abolished, in 1797.
The village, meanwhile, stayed agricultural, and it still is: rice is grown and milled here, in two rice mills, and every September there is the snail festival. At the end of the nineteenth century the farming crisis pushed many people from Valle to Argentina. And there is one detail of recent history you notice at once: the town hall, built in the nineteen-twenties, is one of the best examples of Fascist-era architecture in Lombardy, with MVNICIPIO in Latin characters above the balcony. The Lomellina, after all, was Savoy: Valle passed to the province of Pavia, and so to Lombardy, only in 1859.
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📅 Every year, on 29 September
On 29 September Valle Lomellina celebrates Saint Michael the Archangel; on the first weekend of September the village hosts the Lomellina Snail and Rice Festival.
Straight-line distances from the town centre. Tap a point to open its page.
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
Outside Valle Lomellina, but an easy day trip away.
