Voghera

Voghera is the name of a village that swallowed the name of a city. Iria stood here, named after the Ligurian Iriati; when at the end of the sixth century it went back to being a simple village they called it Vicus Iriae, and from that Vicus Eira, Viqueria, Voghera. Some historians disagree, however, and place the real Iria at Castelnuovo Scrivia, which counted for more in Roman times. The torrent that crosses the town, the Staffora, takes its name from a Lombard boundary stone — or, says the other version, from the fact that it «stat foras», stays outside its banks — and with the Lagozzo canal it turned the nine mills of the borgo.

For centuries that water belonged not to the bishop but to a woman: from the tenth century the Benedictine convent of Santa Maria del Senatore in Pavia held so much property here that the Staffora, its bridges and the roads answered to the abbess, who in the eleventh century built herself a castle too. The one you see today, though, is Visconti work, square with four towers, and inside it keeps frescoes by Bartolomeo Suardi, called il Bramantino. Voghera has been a railway junction since the station arrived in 1858, and to the station belongs its wound as well: in 1962 an accident there killed sixty-three people. As for the «housewife of Voghera», it was Alberto Arbasino who coined her, and the town wears the phrase with irony. Around it begins the Oltrepò of pinot nero and bonarda, with the salame di Varzi; Milan and Genoa are an hour away, in opposite directions.