Adro

Adro sits at the foot of Monte Alto, in the south-west of the province of Brescia, in the Franciacorta wine country. The name first appears on 10 April 822, in a private deed where it is spelled Atro: the abbess Eremperga handed a certain Rampergo a hamlet with its court. Its origin is unsettled, and two readings compete: Latin ater, dark, or acer, for the maple woods once found here. The coat of arms keeps the letter and adds the trade: on green, a silver A with a blunted top between three golden bunches of grapes.

The parish church of San Giovanni Battista was finished in 1769 after a decade of unpaid work by the villagers, who turned up on feast days too: hence the Brescian saying laurà per la césa de Àder, to work for the church of Adro, meaning to work for nothing. The old pieve, Santa Maria Assunta, stands on the hill within the castle walls and now serves the cemetery; of the castle only the fourteenth-century drawbridge gate is left. The other settlement, Torbiato, where the oldest Neolithic finds here turned up, was a comune of its own until 1928.