THE HISTORY

The Torregiani’s family is originally from Montecalvo (called Montecalvo Versiggia since 1863), a municipality of the Oltrepò Pavese (Province of Pavia, Lombardy Region, Italy). It is not easy to explain its origin with certainty; a suggestive hypothesis, and also very likely, is that it descends from a cadet branch of the noble Torrigiani family of Florence, a branch that had to flee from that city in the second half of the 1300s because of the bloody wars between Guelphs and Ghibellines, crossing the Apennines and settling in the early 1400s in Mantua (Asola), in the middle of the Po valley, with the surname Toresani (De Torexianis). From here the diaspora continued along the hilly northern slope of the northern Apennines, reaching westwards as far as the Oltrepò Pavese.

The oldest documents, found in the parish of St. Alexander the Martyr of Montecalvo, show how the Torregiani family was firmly established in one of these hamlets as early as the sixteenth century, so as to give it its name; and still today it is called Casa Torregiani (formerly "Cà de 'Toresani"). The certain genealogical data, inferable from the parochial books, show how they lived in the second half of the 1600s in that locality of the "wealthy" farmers who carried this surname; among them Agostino Toresani (1658-1723), his wife Margherita Alberici (1665-1694) and their children; one of them, Francesco Maria (1682-1767), stipulated one of the first Pavia notarial deeds, to be counted among the most important for the history of agriculture on the Oltrepò hills, since it is one of the first written testimonies of the irreversible passage from lease to sharecropping. From this primitive lineage, also for the much more frequent male filiation, the surname still flourishes in the eastern Oltrepò (Broni and Stradella), in the lower Piedmont (Alessandrino), in the Milanese (Brianza) and in the cities of Trento and Genova.

And slowly from the primitive Toresani, the latinization of the dialectal "Tursan", it became the current Torregiani, passing also through the nineteenth-century modification imposed by some curate, who mistakenly transcribed it with the double G. The family tree, that was possible to rebuild up to now, brings together 12 generations, most of which have always lived in the Casa Torregiani’s area of Montecalvo Versiggia (PV), where the family owned most of the arable land.

PHOTO: below is visible Ca’ Torregiani, depicted in the cold morning of February 13, 1999: it is that group of houses located almost on top of the hill; immediately below there is Ca’ Sartori, while lower down and to the left there is Pornenzo. Just above Ca’ Torregiani, behind the pine, you can see the hamlet of Poggio.