Cazzago San Martino

Cazzago San Martino lies in Franciacorta, with its plain in the hamlet of Pedrocca and its hills around Calino and Bornato. Two readings of the name compete: Mazza traced it to a presumed Cattiacus, from the Roman personal name Cattius, which survives on three gravestones in the Brescia area; Guerrini preferred Cassiciacus. Eleventh-century documents call the village Casiago, thirteenth-century ones Casago, fifteenth-century ones Cazagum; San Martino was added only in 1863, by royal decree.

The bishop's archive in Brescia records a castrum here as early as 1050. The village was a fief of the bishop, who appointed as his vassal a member of the Cazzago family, which had taken its name from the place and by the thirteenth century owned every building inside the walls. Giovanni da Lezze's seventeenth-century survey notes that the fortified village has gone, replaced by a Cazzago palace, today Villa Bettoni-Cazzago. In 1927 the comune absorbed Bornato and Calino, and its arms join the three families' blazons: the bends of the Bornati, the ladder and pennant of the Calini, the golden star of the Cazzago charged with a figure half lily, half lion.