Patron saint festival In 253 days
Feast of Saint John the Baptist
📅 Every year, on 24 June
On 24 June Verrua Po, a municipality of 1,319 inhabitants in the province of Pavia, celebrates its patron Saint John the Baptist.
This village changed bank without moving. Until the seventeenth century the Po ran around what is today the territory of Verrua, which lay north of the river, on a sort of peninsula belonging to the region of the Siccomario; there is news of it only from the sixteenth century, when it was included in the comune of Valbona. Around 1700 the Po changed its course: the peninsula was cut off from the Siccomario and slowly welded itself to the Oltrepò, as the oxbow left by the old channel dried up, a thing that happened before the middle of the eighteenth century. Only then did Verrua become a comune, and since its fields were no longer so dangerously exposed to the violence of the river, it began to prosper: in 1723 it obtained a parish of its own, separated from that of Mezzano Siccomario. Administratively, however, it went on belonging to the Siccomario until 1800, and it was called Verrua Siccomario until 1929, when — the comune of Rea having been suppressed and joined to Verrua — it took its present name. Rea, for that matter, was separated from it again in 1954.
The name, instead, is a wart. Verrua probably comes from the Latin Verruca Viqueriensium, the «verruca of the people of Voghera»: in Latin verruca means a growth, a wart, but in this case it means a knoll or a hillock, that is a small rise. The likeliest hypothesis is that the name referred to a rise that in ancient times emerged on the left bank of the Po; with the passing of the centuries, because of the periodic floods of the great river, the rise and the little village that had grown on it disappeared, swept away by the waters, and the inhabitants of the time were forced to move their village elsewhere, most probably where it stands today. The comune has kept the whole story: on the coat of arms granted in 1999, under the silver cross on a red field, runs the motto VERRUCA VIQUERIENTIUM. Today the fields grow cereals and fodder, and since the middle of the twentieth century a specialised crop: the chrysanthemum. Since 1968 Verrua Po holds every year, in the second half of October, a chrysanthemum show.
🎉 Festivals and feasts in Verrua Po 1
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Near Verrua Po
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
Places to see within 25 km
Outside Verrua Po, but an easy day trip away.
Chiesa di Sant'Ignazio di Loyola 📍 Carpi · 11 km Jesuit church of 1670-1682 in Carpi, on a Greek-cross plan, with scagliola altars and the diocesan museum. Basilica cattedrale di Santa Maria Assunta 📍 Carpi · 11 km Carpi cathedral begun in 1514 to Peruzzi's design, reopened in 2017 after the 2012 earthquake. Chiesa di Santa Maria in Castello 📍 Carpi · 12 km Romanesque pieve of 1184, the oldest church in Carpi, with a Peruzzi façade and twelfth-century frescoes. Chiesa di San Bernardino da Siena 📍 Carpi · 12 km Patron church of Carpi, begun in 1604, with the reliquary bust of Saint Bernardino of Siena.