Vestone

On the afternoon of the twenty-ninth of April 1945, at Nozza, the Second World War ended for the Valle Sabbia. The last retreating German column surrendered to the partisans of the Giacomo Perlasca brigade, Fiamme Verdi Tito Speri division, and was then handed over to the American troops who had arrived in the meantime. The column also included soldiers of the 16th SS-Freiwilligen-Panzergrenadier-Division Reichsführer-SS, the unit that a few months earlier had carried out the massacres of Sant'Anna di Stazzema and Marzabotto: the war closed here, in a square on the valley floor, for men who had come from there.

Vestone, four thousand four hundred and sixty-one inhabitants in the province of Brescia, lies at the geographical centre of the Valle Sabbia, where the Chiese takes in the Degnone and Gorgone torrents. According to nineteenth-century historians this was the site of Stonos, the capital village of the Stoni, conquered by the Romans in 118 BC, and the place name is said to derive from that people. In 1889 a former friary converted into a barracks took in a company of alpine troops that became the Vestone battalion, later sent to the Greek-Albanian front and to Russia; the writer Mario Rigoni Stern served in it as sergeant major, and the town's auditorium is named after him.