Fiesse

Fiesse is the last village at the southern end of the province of Brescia and touches both the Mantua and the Cremona countryside; the name comes from the Latin Flexum, the bend, and the bend can still be seen in the shape of the built-up centre. In the ninth century there was a diaconia of the abbey of Leno here, «ad Flexum», which looked after pilgrims and the sick. A border matter too was the episode of February 1691, when sixteen Spanish dragoons and a trumpeter rode this far because some animals that had run off from the Mantua side had ended up in a local hayloft.

The twentieth century came through here as well: in 1887 the first rural savings bank in the province was founded at Fiesse; in January 1924 a group of fascists surrounded the diaconia demanding the head of the parish priest, and the young Catholics answered back; in 1927 the village lost its comune and became a hamlet of Gambara, getting it back only in 1947. On 29 April 1945 a Nazi reprisal killed the local partisan leader Giuseppe Nazzari and fourteen civilians here.