Pavia

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Pavia is a town of about 73,086 people on the lower Ticino river, some 35 kilometers south of Milan in northern Italy. In 218 BCE, according to tradition, a Roman consul built a wooden bridge across the Ticino here. He was marching to find Hannibal, who had supposedly crossed the Alps into Italy. Centuries later, this same town became a capital four times over. It served as the capital of the Ostrogothic Kingdom from 540 to 553, then of the Kingdom of the Lombards from 572 to 774. It was later the capital of the Kingdom of Italy from 774 to 1024, and the seat of the Visconti court from 1365 to 1413. What was it about this stretch of river that made emperors, kings, and dukes keep coming back to rule from here?

• 2. Guarding the River

  ›

  Long before Rome arrived, the writer Pliny the Elder credited Pavia's founding to the Laevi and Marici, two Ligurian tribes. The geographer Ptolemy instead attributed the town to the Insubres, a Celtic people. Soon after that bridge rose over the Ticino, Rome and Carthage's armies collided close by. Rome suffered one of the earliest crushing defeats of the Second Punic War, and the consul himself nearly died in the fighting. The wooden bridge was destroyed, but the fortified camp beside it survived. It stood as the most forward Roman outpost in the Po Valley and slowly grew into a garrison town called Ticinum. In 187 BCE, the Via Aemilia was extended from Ariminum to the river Po, crossing at Placentia before forking toward Ticinum. From Ticinum the road split again at Laumellum, sending travelers on to Vercellae, Eporedia, Augusta Praetoria, Valentia, and Augusta Taurinorum. Ticinum's own streets followed a grid of square blocks. Its cardo maximus lines up with today's Strada Nuova, and its decumanus corresponds to corso Cavour and corso Mazzini. Beneath those same streets, brick sewer ducts built by Roman engineers kept working through the Middle Ages and beyond, only falling out of use around 1970. The town's name changed too, something few Roman towns experienced. Ticinum became Papia under Lombard rule, and Papia eventually became Pavia, one of only a handful of Roman municipia in Italy renamed during the early Middle Ages. The origin of that new name is still not fully understood. Ticinum's military value did not fade with age. In 271, the emperor Aurelian defeated the Juthungi near the town, and between 273 and 326 Ticinum hosted an important Roman mint. In 325, a boy named Martin, later canonized as Martin of Tours, arrived in the town trailing his father, a Roman officer on assignment. Within a hundred and fifty years, that same garrison town would host the collapse of Roman rule in Italy itself.

• 3. Where an Empire Ended

  ›

  Romulus Augustulus took the imperial throne at Ravenna in 475, placed there by his own father, Flavius Orestes, after Orestes dethroned the previous emperor, Julius Nepos. Orestes, not his teenage son, actually ran the government, while Romulus served as little more than a figurehead. Ten months into that arrangement, one of Orestes's own officers, a man named Odoacer, led a mutiny and killed Orestes inside Pavia in 476. Fires broke out during the fighting and burned through much of the town. Odoacer, now the new ruler, canceled Pavia's taxes for five years so it could rebuild. Rather than execute the powerless Romulus Augustulus, Odoacer pensioned him off with 6,000 solidi a year. He then proclaimed himself king of a new Kingdom of Italy, closing the book on the Western Roman Empire. Odoacer's own reign lasted only until 488, when the Ostrogoths, led by king Theoderic, invaded Italy and went to war against him. After five years of fighting, Theoderic assassinated Odoacer at a banquet meant to seal a peace between them, on the 15th of March 493. Theoderic then launched a large building program across his new kingdom, restoring and expanding Pavia. He began a palace complex there that Lombard kings would later inherit. He also commissioned a Roman-style amphitheatre and bath complex in the town, one of the few bath complexes still working anywhere in western Europe by the seventh century. Near the end of Theoderic's reign, the philosopher Boethius was imprisoned in one of Pavia's churches from 522 to 525, awaiting execution for treason. It was in that cell that he wrote the Consolation of Philosophy, a work that would outlast the kingdom that jailed him. War broke out between the Eastern Roman Empire and the Ostrogoths in 535. In 540, the Eastern general Belisarius defeated the Ostrogothic king Wittigis, costing the Ostrogoths most of their Italian territory. Pavia held out anyway. More than a thousand Ostrogothic soldiers stayed garrisoned there and in Verona, opposing Eastern Roman rule until the kingdom's last resistance finally collapsed in 561.

• 4. Capital of Kings

  ›

  "The city of Ticinum at this time held out bravely, withstanding a siege more than three years," wrote the chronicler Paul the Deacon, describing the Lombard army camped outside Pavia's walls. King Alboin led the Lombards, otherwise called Longobards, into Italy in 568. He had already captured much of the north before Pavia's defenses stopped him in 569. Paul the Deacon added that Alboin "took possession of everything as far as Tuscany except Rome and Ravenna" while the siege dragged on. The siege finally ended in 572, when Alboin's forces broke through and captured the town. By the 620s, Pavia's old Ostrogothic palaces had made it the main residence of the Lombard kings. Lombard rulers spent lavishly on churches, monasteries, and nunneries, partly to display their piety and wealth. They often chose these same buildings as their own future tombs. Even though the earliest Lombard kings followed Arian Christianity, Paul the Deacon recorded that they tolerated their Catholic subjects. Arian and Catholic cathedrals stood side by side in Pavia until the 690s. King Grimoald, who ruled from 662 to 671, built the church of San Ambrogio and was buried there after his death. Aripert I built the basilica of Santissimo Salvatore in 657, which became the burial place of the Bavarian dynasty's kings. Perctarit and his son Cunicpert later added a nunnery and a church of their own. King Liutprand, who ruled from 712 to 744, commissioned the church of San Pietro in Ciel d'Oro. Builders measured it out using the length of Liutprand's own royal foot. Liutprand meant the church as his own tomb. It ended up holding two other Christian figures as well. One was the philosopher Boethius, buried in the crypt. The other was St Augustine of Hippo, the fifth-century North African writer whose On Christian Doctrine reshaped how Christians read scripture. Liutprand had paid heavily to move Augustine's remains from Cagliari to Pavia, keeping them safe from Saracen raiders on Sardinia. On the 1st of October 1695, workers repairing the church's floor lifted some paving stones and rediscovered Augustine's remains underneath. Lombard kings also stamped their own image onto coinage minted at Pavia from the late seventh century. Each coin carried the ruling king's bust as a reminder of who controlled the kingdom's wealth. That authority collapsed in 773, when Charlemagne, king of the Franks, crossed the Alps and crushed the Lombard army of king Desiderius. Charlemagne besieged Pavia between the autumn of 773 and June of 774, then entered the fallen capital and crowned himself king of its former lands. The northern Lombard kingdom became a sub-kingdom of the Franks from that point on, though the southern duchy of Benevento kept its independence for centuries.

• 5. A City of Rivals

  ›

  In 924, an army of Hungarians led by Berengar I, a deposed Lombard king, laid siege to Pavia. The siege failed. Decades later, under Emperor Otto II, the town became a stable seat of the court, first under queen Adelaide of Italy and then under Otto II's wife, Theophanu. Trade thrived through the Ottonian period. The waterways linking the Ticino to the Po gave Pavia's merchants a direct route to the Adriatic Sea, and for a time Milan itself lost ground to Pavia in importance. Between 960 and 965, the Arab geographer Ibrahim al-Turtushi traveled through the region and later described Pavia as the main city of Longobardia, populous and rich in merchants. Unlike other towns in the area, he wrote, it was built entirely of stone, brick, and lime. Al-Turtushi was struck by an equestrian statue called the Regisole standing near a door of the Royal palace, and by the roughly 300 jurists he saw working inside that same palace. By the twelfth century, Pavia had become a self-governing commune, and its politics tilted firmly Ghibelline, loyal to the emperor. That loyalty was sharpened by rivalry with Milan, which led the Lombard League's defiance of Emperor Frederick Barbarossa. Barbarossa himself was crowned twice in Pavia, in 1155 and 1162, inside the basilica of San Michele Maggiore. He also kept a residence in a new imperial palace near the monastery of St Salvatore. Through the eleventh century, Pavia had already clashed repeatedly with Milan, in a war that broke out in 1056 and included the Battle of Campomorto in 1061. Pavia's independence finally gave way in 1359, when the town yielded to the Visconti family, rulers of Milan, after a difficult siege. Under Visconti rule the town flourished as an intellectual and artistic center. Its university was founded in 1361 around the core of an older law school, and it drew students from many countries. Duke Galeazzo II moved his own court from Milan to Pavia and, between 1361 and 1365, built the Visconti castle alongside a large park. His son, Gian Galeazzo, commissioned the Certosa monastery in 1396 at the far end of that park. Its church was meant as a mausoleum for the Visconti family. Gian Galeazzo's rule also reshaped the town's Jewish community. In 1389, on his orders, families of German Jews settled in Pavia, working mainly in finance. That community grew through the 15th century. One figure was Elijah ben Shabbetai, personal doctor to Filippo Maria Visconti and a university professor. Another was Joseph Colon Trabotto, a rabbi considered Italy's foremost Judaic scholar of his era. In 1490, the university even opened a course in Hebrew.

• 6. Scholars and a Young Einstein

  ›

  A school of rhetoric already existed in Pavia by 825, when Emperor Lothair I issued a capitulary ordering students from many northern Italian towns to attend its lectures. Two of the town's own children later carried that scholarly reputation abroad. Liutprand of Cremona, a bishop, chronicler, and diplomat, served Berengar II and then Otto I and Otto II. Lanfranc, the other, became a close collaborator of William the Conqueror and helped reorganize the English church after the Norman Conquest. In the 15th century, as the university grew under the Dukes of Milan, it drew teachers of real renown, among them Baldo degli Ubaldi, Lorenzo Valla, and Giasone del Maino. In the early 16th century, Girolamo Cardano studied at the university. Probably in 1511, a young Leonardo da Vinci studied anatomy there alongside Marcantonio della Torre, the university's professor of anatomy. Centuries later, under Austrian rule, Empress Maria Theresa gave the university strong backing. It entered a period thick with notable minds: Ugo Foscolo, Alessandro Volta, Lazzaro Spallanzani, and Camillo Golgi all worked or taught there. That reputation for science and letters still lingered in 1894. That year, Albert Einstein's father moved the family to Pavia to start a business supplying electrical materials, a company called the Einstein. The Einsteins settled into Palazzo Cornazzani, the very building where Foscolo and the poet Ada Negri had once lived. Between 1895 and 1896, the teenage Albert visited his family in the town several times. During that stretch of his life in Italy, he wrote a short essay titled "On the Investigation of the State of the Ether in a Magnetic Field."

• 7. Sieges and Soup

  ›

  On the battlefield outside Pavia in 1525, Imperial and Spanish forces loyal to Emperor Charles V crushed the French army and captured King Francis I of France himself. The battle marked a turning point. What had once been a rivalry between supporters of the Pope and the emperor now split differently. One party was French and allied with the Pope; the other backed Charles V. Pavia stood firmly on the Imperial and Spanish side. Francis I's capture opened decades of Spanish occupation for the town. Local tradition credits a peasant woman with inventing zuppa pavese soon afterward. The simple soup of broth, eggs, and cheese was supposedly cooked from whatever she had on hand. She meant it to feed the defeated French king. Spanish rule did not go unchallenged. Between the 24th of July and the 14th of September 1655, a French, Savoyard, and Estense army besieged Pavia during the Franco-Spanish war. The army, commanded by Thomas Francis, prince of Carignano, failed to take the town. Spanish control finally ended in 1706, when Austrian forces under Wirich Philipp von Daun captured Pavia during the War of the Spanish Succession. Austria held the town until 1796, when Napoleon's French army moved in. That same year, Jacobin soldiers tore down the ancient Regisole statue. Pavia's own residents then rose up against the French. Napoleon put down the revolt only after a violent fight in the streets. The 20th century brought heavier damage. German forces occupied Pavia in 1943. In September 1944, American bombers struck the town's three bridges over the Ticino, trying to cut off supplies to German units defending the Gothic Line. The bombing destroyed the Ponte Coperto and killed 119 civilians. Allied troops finally entered Pavia on the 30th of April 1945. At the national referendum on the 2nd of June 1946, Pavia backed the Republic with 67.1% of its votes, against 38.2% for keeping the monarchy.

• 8. What Pavia Left Behind

  ›

  Since at least the 13th century, Pavia's municipal banner has carried a red field marked with a white cross. The design is thought to descend from the blutfahne, the original battle flag of the Holy Roman Emperor. The same cross reappears on the town's coat of arms, framed since the late 16th century inside an oval crowned by a mask. Two angels flank the shield, holding letters that read CO-PP, short for Comunitas Papie. Construction on Pavia's cathedral, the Duomo, began in 1488, credited to the designers Donato Bramante, Giovanni Antonio Amadeo, and Gian Giacomo Dolcebuono. Its façade and dome were not finished to that original plan until 1898. The finished dome rises 97 meters and weighs some 20,000 tonnes, an octagonal structure ranked third in size in Italy behind St Peter's Basilica and Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence. Beside the Duomo stood the town's Civic Tower, documented since at least 1330 and enlarged in 1583 by the architect Pellegrino Tibaldi. On the 17th of March 1989, that tower suddenly collapsed. The collapse became the final push behind a decade of work to save the Leaning Tower of Pisa from a similar fate. One fallen tower in Pavia was tied to the survival of one of Italy's best-known monuments.