Zavattarello

The name comes from the trade that was for centuries the town's chief one: the vulgar Latin savattarellum means the place where slippers, savatte, are made, and in dialect the village is still called Savataré. Above the houses stands the castle, built at the end of the tenth century by the monastery of Bobbio and later the personal fief of its bishop. In 1264 the bishop granted it to Ubertino Landi, a warlord excommunicated more than once, who fortified the rocca until it was impregnable and became the terror of the district: with him, paradoxically, the town began to grow. In 1390 bishop Roberto Lanfranchi handed the castle to the captain of fortune Jacopo Dal Verme, and the Dal Verme held it almost without a break until 1975, when they gave it to the comune together with the surrounding land: inside the fortified enclosure Jacopo had founded one of the main schools of war in Europe. The walls are four metres thick on average, the rooms more than forty, and the municipal coat of arms copies the fresco above the entrance gate: a chained dragon guarding a tree of red apples, with the motto Praeda vigil vigilataque poma, the prey is watchful and its fruits well guarded.

Zavattarello, however, has changed state and region more often than is reasonable. Passed to the kingdom of Sardinia in 1743 by the treaty of Worms, then to Napoleonic France and back to Piedmont, in 1859 it ended up in the new province of Pavia and thus in Lombardy; in 1923, when the circondario of Bobbio was broken up, it was assigned to the province of Piacenza and to Emilia-Romagna. The people of the upper valley protested, there was what they called the march on Bobbio, and on 27 February 1925 local referendums were held in which the demand to return to the mother province won almost a hundred per cent; Rome accepted, and in 1926 Zavattarello, Romagnese and Ruino went back to Pavia and to Lombardy, while Caminata and Trebecco stayed with Piacenza. In 1929 the comune absorbed Valverde and was called Zavattarello Valverde until 1956. The rocca, badly damaged by a fire in 1944, has been restored by the comune and can now be visited throughout; the hill around it, once kept bare so that the defenders could see anyone coming, has become a protected park.