All around here, throughout the Middle Ages, there were no villages but farmsteads, often with the owner's villa beside them, and the peculiarity of the Pavia countryside is that those farmsteads were comuni in their own right: already between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries they had communal autonomy despite being no bigger than a farmyard. Valle Salimbene was born in just this way, probably as a farmstead of the Bottigella family that later passed to the Salimbene, and in the seventeenth century it appears in the lists under the name of Cassina della Valle. It belonged to the Campagna Sottana of Pavia and was not enfeoffed to anyone.
In 1871 two other comuni were joined to it, Belvedere al Po and Motta San Damiano, and the second was itself an aggregation of farmsteads: it had been formed in the eighteenth century by uniting the Cassina della Motta and the Cassina di San Damiano. This last is the oldest place in the whole area, known since the twelfth century as Sancto Damiano, and it consisted of a single property, which belonged first to the Templars and then to the Order of Malta; of the knights the Romanesque oratory still remains today. Of this one too, as of the Valle, no feudal lord ever received the investiture.
Straight-line distances from the town centre. Tap a point to open its page.
Near Valle Salimbene
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
