Visano

The coat of arms of Visano illustrates an etymology that almost nobody believes. The story goes that a man of Visano, made ill by the unhealthy air of the place, went to a doctor; and the doctor, pointing at the springs nearby, is supposed to have answered: «drink this water and I shall heal you» — vi sano. Hence the name of the village. On the shield the two figures have become a child and a woman. Scholars, more prosaically, derive Visano from the Latin family name Visius or from a Celtic root meaning low marshy pasture. And the arms, incidentally, were never granted by any decree: the comune simply uses them.

That the air was unhealthy, though, is no legend. In 1610 the Venetian Giovanni Da Lezze noted in his Catastico of the Brescia territory that Visano had few inhabitants precisely because the area was unwholesome. Before that the village had been razed by Mastino della Scala in 1332 and destroyed again, sixteen years later, by Giovanni Visconti. In 1810 it was even suppressed and absorbed into Calvisano, becoming a comune again in 1816; the Brescia-Parma railway arrived in 1893.