Gargnano

Monte Fassane belonged to Gargnano but was used by Bollone, and the thing went on for centuries. An agreement of 1470 laid down that the men of Bollone could graze and cut wood by paying a rent at Epiphany, but the terms were never kept: in August 1751 the men of Gargnano found on the pastures of Smalze 146 sheep and goats from Bollone, seized all the animals and roughly drove off the boys and women guarding them. Since on one side lay Austria and on the other Venice, the matter was settled by a bilateral commission: in 1753 the mountain was divided in two, the southern slope to Gargnano and the northern to Bollone, which undertook to pay a yearly rent.

The municipality is huge and scattered: nearly eighty square kilometres and twelve hamlets on the heights of the upper Garda, among them Costa, which lies eighteen kilometres from the town hall and is one of the hamlets farthest from its own municipal seat in Italy. Since 1962, with the Ponte Cola dam, part of the lake of Valvestino has also come within the territory. In 1943 Mussolini settled here, at Villa Feltrinelli, for the time of the Social Republic; in 1912 the writer David Herbert Lawrence had lived in the village. Three thousand and thirty-three inhabitants.