Zinasco

There was once a municipality that was not a village. San Nazaro del Bosco existed as an autonomous body but had no built-up area of its own: it was only a part of Sairano. In all likelihood its original site had been threatened or destroyed by the Po and its inhabitants had moved to Sairano, while keeping themselves as a separate community. When in 1818 the municipality was absorbed by Zinasco, the name vanished altogether: since there was nothing on the ground to distinguish it from Sairano, not even the place name remained.

Zinasco is made of two centres, Zinasco Vecchio, where the town hall stands, and Zinasco Nuovo, which in the fifteenth century was called Zinaschino; with Sairano they are lined up along the edge of the Lomellina terrace, above the alluvial valley of the Po. Passing to Savoy with the Lomellina in 1713, the village remained for thirty years a border place, because the Oltrepò on the other side was Austrian. In 1866 the hamlet of Cascinino, detached from Dorno, was joined to it. Three thousand two hundred and twenty-three inhabitants in the province of Pavia.