Polpenazze del Garda

On 29 August 1454 thirty-eight heads of families of Polpenazze met and approved the statutes of the municipality. That text describes a village divided into six "ville" — Castello, Fontanelle, Monte, Picedo, Pozzuolo and Vedrine — with a Vicinia that elected twelve councillors in proportion to the weight of each, two consuls, a steward, a notary, a field warden and, among the other offices, a measurer of wine and oil. Five and a half centuries later the village still lives on those two things: it is the largest oil producer in the Valtenesi, it grows Groppello, Marzemino, Sangiovese and Barbera, and between the end of May and the first days of June it fills its old streets with the Wine Fair.

West of the village there is a valley that used to be a lake. The Lucone, an inter-morainic lakelet among the hills of Cassaga, Brassina and San Pietro, was drained between the fifteenth and the eighteenth century; on its shores stood Bronze Age pile-dwelling villages and a still older settlement, from the second half of the fourth millennium BC, which since 2011 have been part of the UNESCO World Heritage. The castle on the hill was raised in the tenth century against Hungarian raids, besieged and taken by Mastino della Scala in 1330 and later destroyed by the Visconti: in 1426 Venice authorised the municipality to rebuild it. The words "del Garda", by contrast, are very recent: they date from 1967.