Manerbio

In Roman times Manerbio was called Minervium, and today's name comes from that. The via Brixiana ran through it, the consular road from the river port of Cremona to Brescia, and the ground around has given up a good deal: five Roman villas, a necropolis of the first to third centuries, the silver Celtic phalerae of the Remondina farmstead, now in the Santa Giulia museum in Brescia. At another farmstead came to light a hoard of about 4,200 Padanian drachmas, silver coins struck between the second and the first century BC.

Under Venice the town headed a Quadra of villages of the Bassa, run by a vicario maggiore who held judicial, administrative and political powers at once. The hospital that still serves a wide stretch of plain begins around 1859: after Solferino and San Martino many wounded were brought here, and the first relief and shelter facilities grew up around that need. The shape of the modern town came instead from the wool mill: in the thirties and forties the rationalist architect Francesco Bonfanti built a 'social town' around the factory, with workers' housing, directors' villas, a cinema, a pool and a boarding school.