Vobarno

Vobarno's oldest name is written on a stone: the Marmo di Atinio, a cenotaph of the first century before Christ, once set into the foot of the parish bell tower, now in the Santa Giulia museum in Brescia. On it Publius Atinius, of the Fabia tribe, stops the traveller and asks him to report he has seen the tomb at Voberna, on the borders of Italy. The present name is thought to come from the Latin Vadum arenae, sand ford.

That tower was the town's own, a Roman inscription still in its foot: when Santa Maria Assunta was rebuilt in the eighteenth century at right angles to the old church, the tower stayed as it was. In it, in medieval times, a Roman marble pine cone some fifty centimetres high turned up: it sits in the library and became the village arms. On the Cingolo hill, above the forced crossing of the Chiese, stood the bishop of Brescia's fortress, pulled down by Bernabò Visconti in the fourteenth century and ending as a church. Ardiccio degli Aimoni is wholly invented, the local man G. Maria Biemmi set at the head of a twelfth-century Brescian tale: a street in the centre carries his name all the same.