Varzi

The Malaspina ruined themselves, by way of a rule. Lombard law required an inheritance to be divided among all male children, and so the marquisate broke into lines ever more numerous and ever poorer in power: in 1275 the Spino Fiorito branch alone split into three, and Varzi ended up administered jointly by a plurality of marquises often at odds with one another. The Sforza of Santa Fiora, who reached the Staffora valley in 1466, simply bought the shares one after another until they were recognised as sole feudal lords. To the Malaspina were left the title, the castle and a few scattered rents.

The village, however, did not grow poor with them: it remained the trading centre of the valley, on one of the salt roads that climbed from the plain to the passes into Liguria. At the end of September 1944 Varzi became the centre of a partisan free zone taking in seventeen municipalities, and so it remained until the twenty-ninth of November; in 2018 the municipality was decorated with the gold medal for military valour. Today it has three thousand four hundred and five inhabitants in the province of Pavia, in a hollow of the Staffora valley.