Mura

The coat of arms of Mura was granted by nobody: the comune simply uses it, and it comes from a seal in use under the Napoleonic Italian Republic, between 1802 and 1805, with the symbols of justice intertwined. The same emblem turns up in three other comuni far apart from one another, Bione, Capo di Ponte and Viano in the Reggio country. The village, also called Mura di Savallo, lies in the Valle Sabbia on the Tovere stream, which feeds the little lake of Bongi, formed by a dam built in 1917.

On the wall of the church, which belonged to the old pieve of Savallo, a plaque records a passage that may never have happened. The legend, born between the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth century, tells that in October 1166 pope Alexander III crossed these mountains, an exile from Rome, pressed by the men of Frederick Barbarossa and challenged by four antipopes. Firm proof has never been found — the churchman Cipriano Gnesotti said as much back in the eighteenth century — but the same story is told in three valleys far from each other, and in 1545 an archpriest of the cathedral of Brescia found at Marmentino the relics believed to have been the pope's gift, and placed them under the high altar.