Muscoline

Muscoline is not one village: it is a handful of hamlets on the morainic hills between Lake Garda and the Valsabbia, and you can read as much in the report of the pastoral visit of 1702. Bishop Marco Dolfin found five hundred and eighty souls there, a parish priest with five other priests and a parish church — Santa Maria Assunta, consecrated on 13 October 1566 by bishop Domenico Bollani — which had seven scattered oratories under it: San Quirico at Campo Longo, San Rocco at Moniga, San Pietro at Morsone, San Giovanni Battista at Cabianco, San Carlo at Longarino, Santa Maria at Burago and the Beata Vergine della Rusega. Those churches are still there, which is why a municipality of two thousand five hundred inhabitants counts six of them.

The municipality too, like its churches, has been made and unmade more than once. Castrezzone became a hamlet of Muscoline by order of Napoleon, but in 1815, with the Kingdom of Lombardy-Venetia, the Austrians annulled the decision and gave it its independence back; after unification the village grew to more than three hundred inhabitants, and it was fascism that suppressed it again and brought it back inside Muscoline. The parish church had an equally long story: remodelled at the beginning of the nineteenth century to a design by Giovanni Gozzoli, it was finished in the middle of the century by the architects Rodolfo Vantini and Giuseppe Conti and consecrated on 28 August 1869. Inside it keeps canvases by Antonio Gandino and Giuseppe Nuvolone.