Learn More – Introductory Panel
“Here there are extensive and ancient forests” where “the villager and the traveler find refreshing shadows”; “very large oak trees extend their branches there, obstructing passage and obscuring the sun’s rays, so much so that the unwary hunter in chasing his prey in the thickest part of the forest can easily get lost there”.
This is how Bernardo Sacco, a man of letters from Pavia, described Lomellina in the mid-16th century. And in those vast forests, in his time, both Francis I, King of France, and Charles V, Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, although engaged in an endless war, had not denied themselves the pleasure of hunting wolves and wild boars. , deer, fallow deer and roe deer, hares and rabbits. The game was in fact so rich that even the farmers could practice it freely.
And so it had always been in Lomellina, a land of bumps and marshes. Visconti and Sforza had been expelled there, and before them the kings of Italy and even Lothair, son of Charlemagne, when he was sent to the peninsula. And bandits and street thieves have always been hiding there.