Martinengo

Martinengo means Martin's property: the ending -engo is Lombard, and it was the Lombards who raised the walls and the castle here, around which the village took shape. The first document to name it is a will of 774. The counts who took their surname from the place left it their red eagle on gold, still the town's arms; when they moved to the nearby castle of Cortenuova in the twelfth century, Martinengo began governing itself.

Below the shield runs the motto Magnifica Communitas Martinenghi, and in 1797, with Venice fallen, the town proclaimed itself the Republic of the Free People of Martinengo, an independence that lasted one summer. Bartolomeo Colleoni, granted these lands by the Venetian Republic, built the Casa del Capitano and, so the story goes, wanted Sant'Agata as wide as a cathedral, since Martinengo was to be the capital of his fief. The centre is still the medieval one, paved and arcaded, and Ermanno Olmi shot scenes of The Tree of Wooden Clogs here; the title of city came in 2011.