Nuvolento

The old parish church of Nuvolento was dedicated to Saint Stefania, a saint who does not appear in the Roman Martyrology. Scholars suppose the name arose from a misunderstanding, adapting that of Saint Stephen, to whom the church's feast was already dedicated: a copying error that became a dedication, and a dedication that became a saint. The church had been raised over a pagan temple, at a point where the Roman road from Brescia towards Verona had given rise to a pagus; the excavation of 1986 turned up a villa and twelve Roman inscriptions, nine of them right beside the old church.

Four thousand and eleven inhabitants in the province of Brescia, at the mouth of the Valle Sabbia. From the ninth to the fifteenth century the life of the village depended on the Benedictines of the monastery of Serle, who drained the land and founded the basilica. In 1215 the lord of the castle asked the abbot to recognise the rights of the newly formed commune; they could not agree and the case ended up in the Broletto at Brescia, where the monastery won. It won the case and lost everything all the same: by the end of the thirteenth century the monastery had been abandoned and the commune had inherited its rights and its property.