Located on the left bank of the river Po, Pomponesco is a charming village of ancient origins, as evidenced by the Roman place-name dating back to the ancient family Pompea who lived here.
Square streets and canals, the Garzaia nature reserve, the main embankment, and here is Pomponesco, a village of visual perspectives that bounce from the river to the square, from the rows of trees to the arcades, from the hedges to the walls.
The appearance of the current village was given by Giulio Cesare Gonzaga, a nobleman who, after being assigned these lands, wanted to transform and reorganize Pomponesco according to a precise urban design, building around the hexagonal castle an orderly and symmetrical network of streets, squares and neighborhoods. Even though the castle was destroyed by the French at the end of the 18th century, Piazza XXIII Aprile is still the heart of the town and is surrounded by characteristic buildings with porticoes that were once inhabited by courtiers and still have large rooms with wooden ceilings. On the square there are the Town Hall and the Church of Santa Felicita and of the Seven Brothers Martyrs with their respective bell towers, and then there is a small square that directs the perspective towards the stairway of the embankment and the river, to indicate one of the activities that between the 18th and 19th centuries, with the increase in river traffic and the trade of grain, favored the economic growth of this area and the settlement of a large Jewish community and whose presence is evidenced by the ‘existence of stately homes, such as Palazzo Cantoni, the remains of the building of the synagogue and the small cemetery, now closed, which houses the remains of the writer Alberto Cantoni, friend of Luigi Pirandello, whose originality was also highlighted by Benedetto Croce and Riccardo Bacchelli. His illustrious contemporary and fellow citizen is also the painter Gerolamo Trenti, one of the most famous exponents of the Lombard landscape of 800, which here spent the last twenty years of life painting in the country house still exists.
