Wazirabad was founded under Shah Jahan by Wazir Khan, the same governor who built the Wazir Khan mosque at Lahore. It stands on the Chenab where the road and later the railway crossed.
Paolo Avitabile, a Neapolitan who came into Ranjit Singh Ji's service in 1827 after soldiering for the Shah of Persia, was made governor of Wazirabad and rebuilt the town. He cut straight streets, put in a bazaar and drainage, built a residence and imposed order by hanging offenders in public in numbers that were remarked on by everyone who passed through. He was later made governor of Peshawar, where the same method was applied and where he is still remembered by name.
Avitabile went home to Italy in 1843 with a large fortune and died there in 1850. His European contemporaries in the Sikh service, Jean-Baptiste Allard, Jean-Baptiste Ventura and Claude Auguste Court, are better known and did more to change the army. Avitabile changed a town.
The Alexandra Bridge over the Chenab at Wazirabad, opened in 1876, carried the main line north.
The town has made cutlery and surgical steel for well over a century and is known in Pakistan for that alone.
In Peshawar they called him Abu Tabela, and the standing account is that a mother could quiet a child with the name for a generation after he had gone. He hanged men from the minarets of the Mahabat Khan mosque, which is the detail every European who wrote about the place in the 1840s repeated.
He rebuilt Wazirabad on a grid with a fort, gardens and public buildings, and the town he left is still legible in the plan.
His tomb is at Agerola above the Amalfi coast, where he was born, and the fortune he carried home was fought over by his relatives for years after he died. The town he governed and the town he came from are six thousand kilometres apart and neither one mentions the other.