San Gervasio Bresciano

For centuries almost all the land of San Gervasio did not belong to the village: it belonged to the chapter of Brescia cathedral, and stayed there until 1797, when the Cisalpine Republic seized and sold it. The municipality had organised itself in the fifteenth century and in 1427 had sworn loyalty to Venice; on 1 March 1447 it was sacked by the Visconti armies, in June 1452 briefly occupied by the Milanese and freed the following year by the Venetians. And yet, in the sixteenth century, there was in Rome a small colony of merchants from here, and their names are known: Bartolomeo Zanca, Defendente Beltrame, Paolo Loda.

The Sangervasio family also dates from the fifteenth century, and its last descendant, Gerolamo, governed the municipality of Brescia during the Ten Days. The parish church of Santi Gervasio e Protasio is of the seventeenth century, enlarged at the end of the nineteenth by Giuseppe Pellini: it has a bell tower forty-six metres high, six side chapels, a barrel vault frescoed from end to end and, in the sacristy, a Nativity by Bernardino Campi of 1545; the organ is a Serassi of 1855, and behind the apse there is a covered cemetery of the late seventeenth century. Outside the village, the Bosco del Lusignolo is a recently planted lowland forest of a little over forty hectares, part of the programme of the ten great forests of the plains and valley floors.