Cigole

For a while Cigole used as its arms a coat that was not its own: the emblem of the Cigola family, which had received the fief in 1511, party green and red with a black eagle crowned in gold in the chief. Since a family's blazon cannot be used as a civic emblem, in 2008 the comune adopted a new one, with a tower: the one part left of the castle, already ruined in the sixteenth century and separated from the village by a wide moat. The name, on the other hand, would come from the «cells» of the Brescian convent of Sant'Eufemia della Fonte, which held the village until the fifteenth century: first Ceole, then Cigolis, then Zigoli, and only from the seventeenth century Cigole.

The village is cut in two by the block of castle, palace and church. Palazzo Cigola-Martinoni began in the sixteenth century as a tower-house and grew for three centuries, one wing at a time; beside it, in 1835, a silk mill was added. In the country church of San Pietro masses were said to ask for an end to drought, and in the Valbruna chapel a fresco recalls one Moniga who saw to the burial of the plague dead. In the nineteen-seventies, then, Cigole was chosen by the Lombardy Region as the site of a careful study of the Brescian dialect: a village taken as the sample of its own language.