The town's motto, from which the very name Tortona comes, says the town is like a lion for three gifts; and it is a motto earned across twenty-five centuries of war. It was here, in 461, that the barbarian general Ricimer deposed and had killed the western Roman emperor Majorian; and it was here, in 1155, that Frederick Barbarossa, come down into Italy to bring the free towns back under his control, laid siege to the city, an ally of Milan, with twelve thousand knights and five thousand foot soldiers. The people of Tortona held out on the castle hill for two months, until the emperor poisoned the springs of the Rinarolo, the town's only source of water: only then did Tortona surrender, and the Pavians, Frederick's allies, sacked and destroyed it. They rebuilt it quickly, with help from the very Milanese for whom they had fought.
The castle, the protagonist of all this history, survived the Visconti, the Sforza, the Spanish and the Savoy before being finally razed to the ground by Napoleon in 1801; in the seventeenth century it had absorbed the old cathedral, converted into a gunpowder store, which was destroyed when lightning struck its bell tower in 1609 and set off the powder. Today Tortona marks the boundary between the plain of Marengo and the first hills of the Ligurian Apennines, and in its hilltop hamlet of Vho tradition still tells of the legendary sea of Vho: in reality just a pool made from the old castle moat, which froze over in winter and gave the children of the past their own skating rink.
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📅 Every year, on 6 March; the «official» feast of the Holy Cross is held on the second Sunday of May
Tortona celebrates Saint Marcianus on 6 March; the town's «official» feast, however, is that of the Holy Cross, generally celebrated on the second Sunday of May in memory of a relic of the Cross kept in the Duomo.
Straight-line distances from the town centre. Tap a point to open its page.
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
