Roncadelle

The name comes from the Latin runco, to weed and reap: in the early Middle Ages the place was Runca, then Runkethelle, and the arms still say so, with a billhook beside a bridge over the Mella. In 760 the Lombard king Desiderio gave this land to the monastery of San Salvatore, later Santa Giulia, just founded in Brescia by him and his wife Ansa: for centuries the nuns ran it, with a mill, a farm and a hospice on the Orzinuovi road. Two separate quarters grew along the two roads, welded into one village only in the nineteenth century.

When the monastery faltered the Porcellaga, Brescian townsmen, took over: in 1386 they won a ten-year concession on the tolls, renewed for the sons and made free and perpetual in 1410. They built the castle halfway between the two quarters, to make the point, and had the seriola dug from the Mella, the area's main irrigation network for over five centuries. It ended badly: the family's violence forced Venice to step in repeatedly, ending with the arrest and conviction of Pietro Aurelio.