Marone

In the Middle Ages the people here climbed away from the water: they settled in more defensible places such as Pregasso, where in the tenth century there was a castle later destroyed by fire. The lake and the torrents were frightening. Marone came back down and became the chief settlement only in the second half of the sixteenth century, when those same torrents stopped being a danger and became motive power: between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries iron was smelted and worked here and wool was fulled, and the village came to count as one of the most important industrial centres of Lake Iseo.

The coat of arms says the two things that matter: a wooden cross rising out of the wavy water and, above it, a chestnut branch with three fruits. Today wool is still worked, felts are made and dolomite is quarried, and since the second half of the twenty-tens the olive has come back. Three thousand two hundred and ninety-three inhabitants in the province of Brescia, at two hundred metres on the eastern shore of the lake, where in Roman times the via Valeriana ran from Brescia to the Val Camonica.