Before the Po Valley became the tidy territory that we cross today following highways, fields and inhabited centers, between the Adda and the Serio there existed a completely different landscape, made up of water, marshes, alluvial deposits and marshy areas that collective memory would have transformed into an enormous lake called Gerund. And it is precisely in those waters, according to a legend that has crossed the Lodi area, the Bergamo area and the Cremona area for centuries, that a creature capable of making the Loch Ness monster seem almost harmless lived: Tarantasioa dragon or enormous serpent that attacked boats, fed on men and especially children and had such a pestilential breath that it made the air around the shores unbreathable.
The most surprising detail, however, is not so much that Lombardy had its own Nessie many centuries before the Scottish creature became an icon of popular culture, but what happened next. Because Tarantasio would not have remained confined to the stories told around the Gerundo: one of the traditions has it that it was an ancestor of the Viscontithe dynasty that would govern Milan, and that the famous one would be born from the victory over the monster Biscionethe serpent depicted with a human figure in its jaws which we still immediately associate with the history of Milan today.
It’s a perfect story. So perfect, in fact, that it must be told by distinguishing what belongs to legend from what we know with greater certainty.
The disappeared lake of Lombardy
The first mystery concerns Lake Gerundo itself, which in the imagination is described as an enormous body of water lying between Adda and Serio, but which probably should not be imagined as a lake with perfectly defined banks. The landscape was rather a changing system of marshes, marshes, waterways and extensive periodically submerged areas, impressive enough to leave a profound mark on the communities that inhabited it and to become, over the centuries, a true Lombard “sea” in popular tradition.
The water progressively receded through a process in which both the natural evolution of the territory and the drainage, canalization and reclamation works which profoundly modified this part of the plain played a role. In legend, however, the explanation was infinitely more spectacular: the lake had disappeared together with its monster.
Tarantasio represented everything that was threatening and incomprehensible about that land. The swamps produced unpleasant fumes, fog covered the territory, the waters could be dangerous and diseases whose origins were unknown affected the inhabitants; phenomena that, long before scientific tools existed to interpret them, could easily be brought together in the figure of a creature whose breath poisoned the environment. The tradition of the “pestilential breath” could in fact have a much more terrestrial explanation than the dragon, linked to the exhalations of the marshy areas.
The monster thus gave a body to fear: if something made the air unhealthy, destroyed a boat or made someone disappear in the water, somewhere beneath the surface Tarantasio must live.
Who killed Tarantasio?
As happens with legends that survive for many centuries, the one about the death of the dragon also changes depending on who tells it. There are those who attribute the feat to a saint, those who connect it to Federico Barbarossa and those who bring an ancestor of the Visconti family onto the scene; precisely this last version has inevitably become the most fascinating, because it seems to offer a perfect explanation to one of the most famous heraldic symbols in Europe.
The knight would have defeated the monster that terrorized the population and, after killing it, would have taken its image as an emblem of his family. The defeated Tarantasio would thus become the Visconti snakethe large serpent-like creature that holds a human figure in its jaws, traditionally interpreted in different ways, from the child to the Saracen.
The historical reality, however, is more complex. Treccani probably connects the snake sign to the ancient office of vicecomes covered by the Viscontis and to the serpent of the Basilica of Sant’Ambrogio, also putting forward the hypothesis that the human figure was added in relation to the participation of the Lombards in the expedition to Palestine in 1100. There is therefore no historical proof that the Biscione was born directly from Tarantasio: the killing of the dragon belongs to the legendary construction that developed around the symbol.
And it is perhaps precisely this overlap between history and myth that has made the story so resistant. When a dynasty already uses a snake as its insignia and, a few dozen kilometers away, entire communities pass down the story of an enormous reptile that lived in the swamps, sooner or later the two stories inevitably end up meeting.
The “dragon bones” really existed
Then there is a detail that makes Tarantasio even more interesting: for the men of the Middle Ages and subsequent centuries the dragon was not necessarily just a story, because what were considered its bones even existed.
In fact, large bones attributed by tradition to the Gerundo monster have been preserved in various churches in Lombardy. In Sombreno, in the Bergamo area, a gigantic “Tarantasio rib” was subsequently traced back to a mammoth, while other similar relics were reported in Pizzighettone and Almenno San Salvatore. Treccani recalls precisely how fossil remains of large animals, impossible to identify with the knowledge of the time, were able to fuel tales of monstrous creatures.
Imagining the effect produced centuries ago by the discovery of a bone almost as long as a person is not difficult. Without paleontology, natural history museums or knowledge of the existence of mammoths and large prehistoric animals, an out-of-scale find needed an explanation, and the dragon everyone knew offered the most immediate one.
In this sense Tarantasio becomes something more than a simple medieval fairy tale: it is the result of a process through which geological phenomena, animal remains, collective fears and landscape transformations are put together to build a story capable of explaining the world.
From the Biscione dei Visconti to the Alfa Romeo
The most extraordinary part of the journey, however, begins when the legend ends, because the Visconti snake survives the dynasty and progressively becomes one of the most powerful graphic signs linked to the Milanese identity.
A distinction needs to be made: the official coat of arms of the Municipality of Milan is not the Biscionebut the white shield with the red cross, still used today by the city administration. The snake is instead the historical emblem of the Viscontis and the duchy and, thanks to the strength that that dynasty exerted on the city, it has entered the symbolic heritage of Milan to the point of becoming almost inseparable from its image.
Just look at one of the most well-known Italian brands in the world, that ofAlfa Romeo: next to the Milanese cross appears the Biscione, a visual legacy of the city’s past. Treccani explicitly mentions the car manufacturer among the companies that have adopted the Visconti symbol in their brand.
Even theInter has built a very close relationship with Biscione over the years. It is not part of the club’s current logo, but it has appeared several times in its visual identity, from the twentieth century coats of arms to the shirts and celebratory campaigns, so much so that the club itself defines it as one of its symbols; in 1960 an oval Nerazzurri emblem dominated and returned with even greater force at the end of the Seventies.
The medieval snake was thus transformed into automobiles, football, communication and design, spanning almost a thousand years without losing its recognisability.
The dragon that Lombardy has never forgotten
And Tarantasio, in the meantime, has not disappeared together with its lake. In the Lodi area the myth continues to be part of the local identity and in Castelgerundo the dragon has even been recovered as a symbol of the territory, a sort of Po Loch Ness capable of describing a landscape that today no longer exists in the form in which medieval men imagined it.
It is impossible to prove that it was really Tarantasio who created the Visconti Biscione and historical reconstructions actually suggest different origins for the family emblem, but perhaps the most interesting point is not establishing which version “won”. It is observing how an unhealthy swamp, some enormous bones emerging from the ground, a heraldic serpent and centuries of passed down stories ended up merging to create one of the most surprising legends of Lombardy.
The dragon didn’t exist, at least as far as we know. Its symbol, however, has survived so well that it still travels the streets in cars, reappears on the shirts of a football team and continues to tell the story of Milan long after the waters in which it supposedly lived have disappeared.
