Pompiano

The name of this village is the name of a Roman soldier, or rather of the family he belonged to. When the Romans divided the plain among their legionaries, each plot took the name of its holder's gens with the suffix -anus added: the fundus that fell to a man of the gens Pompeia thus became Pompeianus, then Pompianus, and finally Pompiano. The same thing happened to dozens of villages on this plain, and those who live in them still carry, without knowing it, the surname of a centurion.

Three thousand eight hundred and ninety-three inhabitants in the province of Brescia, on the western lowland, in countryside full of resurgent springs. The municipality includes two other settlements, Gerolanuova and Zurlengo, which appear already in a document of the second half of the eleventh century as Gerola and Surlengo: they were the property of the cleric Odone, who placed most of his goods under the jurisdiction of the prior of Pontida. From the fifteenth century until 1797 the village was Venetian territory. Between 1928 and 1950 it had a station on the Brescia-Soncino tramway.