Villanterio

Villanterio is the village of Lanterio: Villa Lanterii, as a diploma of Frederick I of 1164 calls it, from a personal name of Germanic origin. The curious thing is that the name came back. On the twenty-fifth of February 1260 the Pavian monastery of San Pietro in Ciel d'Oro, which held the lordship over the village, sub-enfeoffed it to one Lanterio de Villa, perhaps a descendant of the ancient local lords: after centuries the village of Lanterio found itself with another Lanterio for master.

In 1414 Filippo Maria Visconti granted the inhabitants privileges and exemptions and laid down how they were to govern themselves: the nobles and the people elected six probi viri, and one of them served as podestà. In 1751 the village had one thousand seven hundred and ninety inhabitants, a particular council of twenty members, a consul who swore his oath in the praetorium of Pavia, and it kept a permanent representative of its own in Milan, Pietro Francesco Bassano; the feudal lord of the time drew sixty-one lire a year from it. The castle, bought piece by piece in the sixteenth century by the Rizzi and frescoed in six halls, declined from 1667 until it became tenant-farmers' housing. Three thousand one hundred and fifty-three inhabitants in the province of Pavia.