Moniga del Garda

The castle of Moniga has come down to us almost intact for a simple reason: no lord ever lived in it. It was not a feudal lord's residence but the refuge of the people of Moniga, the place where the village shut itself in when danger came; and since it belonged to nobody worth besieging, nobody ever attacked it. So the late Romanesque structure has stayed as it was. The village, on the western shore of Lake Garda, is much older than the castle: on the shore lie the remains of a pile dwelling of the early Bronze Age, between two thousand and eighteen hundred years before Christ.

Today Moniga calls itself the city of Chiaretto, after the rosé wine of the Valtenesi made from Groppello grapes by a particular fermentation, and since June 2008 it has hosted "Italia in Rosa", the national show of rosé wines; the protected-origin extra virgin olive oil of Garda is made here too. The parish church is dedicated to Saint Martin, patron of soldiers, a cult brought by the Franks: it was a chapel under the pieve of Manerba and was consecrated on 13 October 1454 by bishop Ermolao Barbaro, while the building seen today is baroque, from the last decades of the eighteenth century. There is also the Romanesque church of the Madonna della Neve, of the sixteenth century, dedicated to the miracle of the snow that fell in Rome on the Esquiline on 5 August of the year 352.