Marcheno

Marcheno and Brozzo spent a century and a half being separated and reunited according to whoever was in charge. The Napoleonic administration merged Cesovo with Brozzo and put Brozzo and Marcheno in two different districts; the Austrians placed them back in the same one, the district of Gardone; after Italian unification they were divided again, this time into two magistracies. Only in 1927 did they become a single municipality. The chief settlement had already shifted on its own: in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the centre of the commune was Aleno, as a tax roll of 1389 and a Malatesta codex of 1418 record, after which the valley-floor village came to count for more.

Four thousand three hundred and fifty-nine inhabitants in the province of Brescia, in the middle Val Trompia, on the river Mella. Here gun-making is a very old trade and craft production is still widespread. Above the village, the plateau of Caregno lies at a thousand metres and from there the paths set out for Monte Guglielmo; north of Monte Sonclino, instead, is the Punta dei Quattro Comuni, a shoulder on whose summit the boundaries of Marcheno, Casto, Sarezzo and Lumezzane all meet. The sanctuary of the Madonnina, on the old Valeriana road, was built in the first decade of the seventeenth century.