Zeme

The name, they say, comes from two camps: gemina castra, the camps that the Romans of Gaius Marius pitched in these parts while waiting for the Cimbri. From that came Gemide, then Zemide, and a long series of forms that the documents record one after another: Zemidi in 1157, Zemethi in 1165, Cemide in 1250, and finally Zem, as it appears on the map of the Duchy of Milan painted in 1581 in the Gallery of Maps of the Vatican palaces. The fief, in the early Middle Ages, was divided between the bishop of Pavia and the bishop of Vercelli, that is between two dioceses that shared it out.

The matter was settled in an unusual way. In 1532 the duke gave Zeme to the chapter of Vigevano as the dowry of the bishopric then being set up: from that moment the village ceased to be a lordship and the bishop of Vigevano took the title of Count of Zeme, which he went on bearing even after the Napoleonic expropriation of Church property. In the middle of the village stands an eighteenth-century palace with battered walls and a small crenellated cylindrical tower, and tradition has it that an underground passage ran from there to the monastery of Marza. In the Loja marsh, among the quicksands, the herons nest.