Carpenedolo

The name is a collective: from carpinus, the hornbeam, with the -edolo ending that around Brescia marks a multitude: the place of the hornbeams. The forms follow one another in the records, Carpanetulo in the twelfth century, Carpenedulo in the thirteenth, Carpenedolo in the sixteenth, and the oldest church points the same way, the Romanesque pieve of Santa Maria in Carpino, its Botticino stone apse studded with reused Roman and early medieval fragments. The tree stayed the town's sign: the first arms, set in 1554 on the later demolished town hall, showed a double-crowned hornbeam with the words Communitas Carpinetuli; an eighteenth-century seal showed a single crown, and the present shield is silver, the tree proper on a green field.

The village is cut by the Fossa Magna, a canal willed by Bernabò Visconti that drew from the Chiese by way of Lonato: in 1750 Montichiari intercepted that water, and since then the Carpenedolo stretch lives on springs alone, beginning with the fontanone of Sant'Apollonia. In the nineteenth century the canal was covered at several points inside the town; to the south the wheel of one of its mills survives. On monte Rocchetta stood a castle already there in 1043, destroyed during Frederick II's descent into Italy despite the defence of captain Ardizzone Losco Poncarale; its battlemented tower remains. Palazzo Laffranchi became a hospital by its last owner's will and stayed one for over three centuries.