Longhena

Longhena is the smallest comune in the province of Brescia by area, and perhaps its name says so: it probably comes from a Latin word for a long strip of land, and that is exactly how the historic territory runs, along the north-south axis. Another reading, Paolo Guerrini's, takes it from the dialect longa ègna, long vine, and would point to a strong cultivation of the vine. There was a castle of the Longhena family, who died out in the sixteen hundreds and were replaced by the Soncini: the keep is still there, and at the northern entrance you can still see the slots that worked a drawbridge, which means the building once had a ditch around it. In 1452 Francesco Sforza camped here with his troops. The village grew as a cluster of farmsteads with their manor houses, along the main road, which followed the course of an artificial canal, then open in several places and crossed by little bridges.

A little north of the castle the Soncini built themselves a palace, in the second half of the sixteen hundreds. When they left the scene, in the eighteen hundreds, the building stood abandoned for more than a century and was used for the most disparate purposes: stable, hayloft, and even a pharmacy, fitted into one of the ground-floor rooms — and to open its door one of the baroque marble fireplaces was destroyed. At the end of that century an earthquake brought down the vaults of the gallery on the first floor. In 1993 the western half was bought and in 1995 restored, and the late seventeenth-century frescoes came back to light on the vaults of every room and on every wall of the great staircase; those on the walls of the rooms were too ruined, but they survive in the other half of the palace. What remains besides: two internal windows of blown glass, the original marble portal with its balcony above, the rear portico on Tuscan columns, and the wrought-iron gate of the park, which somehow escaped the metal requisitions of both wars. From 1928 Longhena was a hamlet of Mairano; it became a comune again after the second.