Vistarino

Vistarino stands on the left bank of the Olona, but not the one everybody knows. This river runs some forty kilometres entirely within the province of Pavia and ends in the Po at San Zenone, and it bears the same name because it is the same river: originally they were two lengths of a single course, which the Romans cut in two by diverting the upper part, at Rho, towards Milan — the city needed water for the moat of its walls and a waterway to accompany the road to Lake Maggiore. The lower stretch was left without a source and with its name intact: today it is born from the meeting of two irrigation ditches, and one of its three locks is at Vistarino itself.

The village was already called Vestarino in the twelfth century and belonged to the Campagna Sottana of Pavia. In the fourteenth century it was held by the Beccaria, the branch of messer Fiorello, and passed by marriage to the Giorgi di Soriasco; when these died out, in the seventeenth century, their relatives the Giorgi di Pavia bought the fiefs that had been the Beccaria's and were made counts of Vistarino. Since then the family has borne the village's name, and not the other way round: they are the Giorgi di Vistarino. In 1872 the comuni of Buttirago and Vivente were united to it.