Tremosine sul Garda

Tremosine stands on a terrace overlooking the upper lake of Garda, and of its eighteen hamlets only one, Campione, reaches the water: from all the others the lake is something you look down on. The name appears as early as 1185, in a bull of pope Urban III, and nobody quite knows where it comes from: perhaps from the Etruscan Tremusina, perhaps from tramoggia, the measure of three bushels. What is certain is that the god Bergimo was worshipped here, and above his altar, so the reconstruction goes, the first Christian parish church was raised.

As a comune Tremosine is attested from 12 May 1268, and it was divided into four quadre — Pieve, Sermerio, Vesio, Voltino — each with its own vicinia: the consul was drawn by lot among the councillors, stayed in office one month and held the powers of a judge. The quadre also quarrelled in earnest: the church of Vesio obtained its own parish only in 1750, after a hundred and seventy years of arguments and clashes, some of them bloody. The plague of 1630, meanwhile, had carried off six hundred people.