Villachiara

The church of this village was willed in a testament of 1421 and finished in 1868. Bartolomeo I Martinengo ordered his heirs to build a church for the borough, which was growing populous; it was his nephew Vittore who built it, decades later, and in 1479 pope Paul II consecrated it, dedicating it to Clare of Assisi. The first parish church proper was consecrated on 29 September 1539 and held frescoes by Antonio Campi and Lattanzio Gambara, the same artists who had decorated the castle. Then, on 6 May 1754, count Giovanni Martinengo di Villagana solemnly laid the first stone of a new and finer church, before all the people, the clergy and four priests come from Ovanengo and Gabbiano; but he died, and the work stopped just after the presbytery. The church was completed only more than a century later, with the forty thousand lire left by will by countess Caterina Martinengo di Villagana, and blessed on 25 October 1868.

The castle, built by the Martinengo around 1370, came to an inglorious end. In the seventeenth century the local branch of the family died out and the Bargnani took their place, holding castle and village for more than seventy years, until 1750. It went badly: Bartolomeo Bargnani, with a large band of bravi at his back, long tyrannised the people and reduced the castle to a mere arms depot, making it the base from which he organised his actions over the country along the Oglio. When he died, on 29 July 1743, the parish priest don Giuseppe Boccelli called for subsidies for the people, worn out by that oppression — and Bartolomeo's own heirs took part in them, ceding little by little all their goods to the Martinengo of Villagana, who had been claiming them for a century. Long before, in the summer of 1259, Ezzelino III da Romano, furious at not having taken Orzinuovi, had put the surrounding country to fire and sword: the chronicler Domenico Codagli lists the villages that suffered, and Villa Chiara is among them.