Tower where Colombo Domenico, father of Christopher Columbus, was born. Christopher Columbus (Latin Christophorus Columbus) He was born in Genoa, between August 26 and October 31, 1451 – Valladolid, May 20, 1506. He was an Italian navigator and explorer of the Republic of Genoa. Christopher was the firstborn of four children (three boys and a girl) of Domenico Colombo and Susanna Fontanarossa, managers of a small textile company. Probably from Pradello the Colombo family moved to Genoa, with which Bettola had intense commercial relations, to escape the continuous looting of the Visconti militias that raged in the area in the mid-fifteenth century.
Piacenza, Bettola and Terrarossa di Mocònesi In the nineteenth century it was instead hypothesized, without substantial foundation, that the Colombo family had Piacenza origins. According to the above conjecture, based on some sixteenth-century documents, Cristoforo would have been the natural son of a nobleman of the Pallastrelli family of Piacenza and of the Jewess Susanna, who only later married Domenico Colombo, Cristoforo's father. According to others, however, the birthplace of Columbus could be identified in the municipality of Bettola, in the Piacenza area. Terrarossa could in fact refer, rather than to the hamlet of Moconesi, to the lands full of iron located near the hamlet of Pradello and owned by the Colombo family. In Pradello there is in fact a medieval stone building that an ancient tradition identifies as the "Colombo tower", used as a small museum. If there is a possibility of the Colombos' Piacenza origins, the supposition of a flight of the family from Pradello to escape the raids of the troops of the Duchy of Milan, which actually occurred in Val Nure in 1439, seems to be discarded. Quinto al Mare, Mocònesi and Bettola are in any case centers located along what was once a trade route between the Genoese and the Po Valley, so it could be considered probable that Giovanni and Domenico Colombo, grandfather and father of the navigator, moved from Quinto or Terrarossa di Mocònesi to Pradello di Bettola.
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