San Paolo

In the nineteen-sixties the municipality found itself with two neighbouring villages, Oriano and Pedergnaga, and with churches that were no longer adequate for either. The solution was to build a brand-new quarter exactly halfway between them, containing the offices and a new parish church: as it grew, that stretch of built-over farmland welded the two settlements into one. In 1965 bishop Luigi Morstabilini suppressed the two old parishes of Oriano and Pedergnaga and set up a single one in their place, and the church was completed in 1967. Before that, on the twenty-fifth of October 1963, the council had also changed the name: from Pedergnaga Oriano to San Paolo, in honour of Paul VI, the pope from Brescia elected four months earlier.

Four thousand five hundred and four inhabitants in the province of Brescia, on the plain, where the Strone rises by the little lake of Scarpizzolo. The municipality had been created in 1927 by abolishing Oriano, Cremezzano and Scarpizzolo, all merged into Pedergnaga. On the coat of arms, beside the tower, are five ears of spelt: one for each of the formerly independent hamlets, and at the same time a memory of the Pagus Farraticanus, the Roman district of the Brescian countryside that took its name from spelt. The spelt of San Paolo is still grown and is registered as a municipal denomination.