Verolavecchia

Whoever wrote this village's history admitted it without circumlocution: Verolavecchia can boast no history of spectacular events. Shut in between Quinzano, Monticelli, Scorzarolo and Verolanuova, off the roads that mattered, it appears in no chronicle of battles, was never sacked, and even the commune of Brescia seems to have taken no interest in these parts. It is a rare and enviable condition: long periods of peace, and nobody with any reason to come through here with an army.

Three thousand eight hundred and seventy-five inhabitants in the province of Brescia, on the Oglio, which here divides the Brescian country from the Cremonese. What did in fact happen came from hunger: in 1871 a great drought burned the harvest and famine followed, and with it pellagra, because people ate nothing but starch — about 600 were affected. In 1928 the village lost its independence, joined by law to Verolanuova, and regained it on the sixth of March 1948. From Verolavecchia came Giuditta Alghisi Montini, mother of Paul VI, who is an honorary citizen of the village.