Bovezzo

Monsignor Paolo Guerrini ruled out a Roman personal name behind the toponym — Bovo, Boethius — and the Latin bos, ox: more likely the dialect Boés hides bova, mud, fitting a settlement grown on the two banks of a spring. The hamlet of Conicchio bears him out, from cuniculum, «small channel», perhaps a memory of the Roman aqueduct that supplied Brescia.

That aqueduct, built under Octavian Augustus, gathered the waters of the Valle Gobbia and crossed the Val Trompia; it served until the fifth century, and well-kept stretches still lie in the basements of a few private houses. The name surfaces in two thirteenth-century documents, for a church under the pieve of Concesio; the bond grew so close that the Brescia tax roll of 1435 counts the two places as one comune. On Monte Spina the sanctuary of Sant'Onofrio keeps a Madonna and Child attributed to Vincenzo Foppa and frescoes attributed to Romanino.