Nuvolera

In 1610 the Venetian governor Giovanni Da Lezze counted Nuvolera the way one counts an estate: eight hundred inhabitants, two hundred and fifty households, one communal mill, sixty pairs of oxen, twenty draught horses, thirty carts. He listed the nine noble families who spent their summers there — Confalonieri, Porcellaga, Rodengo, Rozzoni, Gambara, Bargnani, Soldo, Lana, Folli — and the four peasant families who actually mattered, Usanza, Alberti, Zanardi and Perugini. The rest of the population he dispatched in a single line: poor people who keep themselves alive in the woods, burning lime and cutting timber.

The village, four thousand five hundred and thirty-five inhabitants in the province of Brescia, owes its name to that work of clearing: a small monastic community settled here between the fifth and sixth centuries and led the tenants in draining and reclaiming, and land wrested from the waste was new land, novus, hence Nuvolera. The first document naming the community is dated the seventh of May 1176, an arbitration over the ownership of Monte Dragone. On the summit of Monte Cavallo a circle of stones survives, known in dialect as the Sercol; in the cave called Buco d'Ernesto, stone tools and pottery of the Polada culture were found in 1956.