The name says what it was: a villa nova, a farming settlement founded or refounded probably in the tenth century, when this land belonged to the monastery of Santa Maria Teodote in Pavia. Soon afterwards the Ardenghi became its lords, so that by 1250 the place was already called Villanova de Ardenghis. It stands on the edge of the terrace above the alluvial valley of the Ticino, on the historic route of the Via Francigena, between Gropello Cairoli and Pavia. The parish church of San Cristoforo goes back to the thirteenth century; on its flank, around 1980, the painter Piero Maccaferri set in a large niche a mosaic of the saint carrying the child Jesus on his shoulders.
With neighbouring Carbonara the bond was close — for a time even the church depended on the parish over there — but in feudal terms the two went separate ways: from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century Villanova belonged to the Eustachi of Pavia, lords of much of south-eastern Lomellina, and from 1666 to the Peverelli of Milan, before passing with the whole Lomellina to Savoy in 1713. In the fields just outside the village, along the railway to Vercelli, the best-known scene of Il ragazzo di campagna was filmed: the one in which the peasant Artemio and his friends spend the afternoon watching the train go by.
Straight-line distances from the town centre. Tap a point to open its page.
Near Villanova d'Ardenghi
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