Bagnolo Mella

The name may come from the Latin balneolum, a small bath or pool, or from a personal name, Albagnolo; local scholarship offers both and settles on neither. The second half is stranger, since the river Mella does not touch the municipal territory: the town council asked for it, and a royal decree granted it in 1862. The real water lies elsewhere: ditches and channels irrigate the plain, and the Vaso Molone follows an old bed of the Garza, once filling the moat of Palazzo Spada Avogadro and turning a mill wheel.

The first document to name the village is from 1169: the bishop of Brescia reminds the nuns of Santa Giulia to pray for countess Ferlinda, who had ceded him the court of Bagnolo. Francesco Sforza burned the castle to punish a place that had sided with Venice, and the peace that ended the war of Ferrara bears Bagnolo's name although the parties met in 1484 in a house used as an inn at Chiaviche di Poncarale. A Monte di Pietà was founded in the sixteenth century; the arms are silver, with a red cross and four five-pointed stars.