Capriolo

Capriolo takes its name from the Caprioli counts, one of Brescia's oldest patrician houses, and through them from the Latin capreolus, the roe deer. The arms confirm it: on silver, a roe deer leaping, an emblem the town uses freely though it was never officially granted. The village first appears in a document of the year 879, when Carloman of Bavaria gave his holdings there to the Brescian monastery of San Salvatore; on Leonardo da Vinci's map of Lake Iseo it reads Chapriolo, in his mirror hand.

The hilltop castle was long a keystone of the quarrel between Brescia and Bergamo over the waters of the Oglio. In 1265 it fell to Charles of Anjou's troops under Robert of Flanders, who had the garrison and the inhabitants killed; the chronicler Elia Caprioli claims that among the survivors who reached Brescia were the forefathers of the Caprioli family itself. After the Peace of Lodi the fortress lost its military use, and at the end of the seventeenth century the ruin went to nuns from the island of the Grazie in Venice, who made it a convent.