Camisano

From this village of a few hundred houses came an antipope. Guido da Camisano was made a cardinal by pope Eugene III and then, supported by Frederick Barbarossa, became antipope under the name of Paschal III: it was he who canonised Charlemagne, and his pontificate lasted five years, until 1168. He was not the only one: Giovanni da Camisano had been elected cardinal of San Grisogono by Paschal II. The members of the family of the counts of Camisano were, in short, protagonists of the ecclesiastical affairs of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and to them is owed the first building of the parish church of San Giovanni Battista, which goes back to the fourteenth century and was almost entirely rebuilt in 1592; beside it stands an oratory dedicated to the Madonna della Neve, a fine building of the sixteenth century.

The rest is given back by the ground. The first official document that speaks of Camisano is of 960, and it is a deed of exchange of lands: from it we know that at that time the village had a castle and two basilicas, one dedicated to the Mother of God and the other to Saint Peter, both vanished for many centuries. Where the castle stood there is now a field still called Castello, and a little way down one finds ruins and remains of walls. In the campo Salone, near the Cascina San Giacomo, a hoard of about five hundred sesterces of the imperial age came to light: on the less encrusted pieces one could read the effigies of Trajan and Hadrian, of the Severi and the Antonines, and of lesser known emperors who followed one another during the military anarchy. Older still are the Neolithic finds — an axe-hammer, a hatchet of dark green stone, pendants of sandstone and of limestone, a stone awl — now at the museum of Crema. Even the name is uncertain: it is read as Cà di Misano or Massano, and some see in Misano a person of the tenth or eleventh century to whom the foundation would go back, others the name of a place.