Orzivecchi

In dialect the people of Orzivecchi are "i Urs Vècc", the old bears, but the bear has nothing to do with it: the name most probably comes from the patron saint, George. From the Latin Georgius it went to Orgi, then to Orci and to Orceus, and from there someone drew out the bear by false etymology. The "old", on the other hand, has a precise date: in 1193 the commune of Brescia founded Orzinuovi not far away, and from then on this village, to tell itself apart, became the old one. The coat of arms too was born of a transformation: the rake on it is a label, the toothed bar of the Angevin arms that became a mark of Guelph allegiance, which someone redrew as the comb of a real rake, with pointed teeth.

The church dearest to the village is not the parish church of Santi Pietro e Paolo, recorded in the fifteenth century and rebuilt in the eighteenth, but the old pieve of Santa Maria known as the Pieve di Bigolio, which goes back to the seventh or eighth century: thirteen hundred years of history among the fields of the Brescia lowland. The twentieth century passed through here with two sets of tracks and took both away: between 1928 and 1950 the village had a stop on the Brescia-Soncino tramway, and in 1932 the station on the Cremona-Iseo railway was opened, no longer in service today.