Grontardo

Grontardo took the same village twice. Levata was a small farming village of the Cremona countryside, with four hundred and ten inhabitants in the middle of the eighteenth century; in the Napoleonic age, from 1810 to 1816, it was already a hamlet of Grontardo, but with the founding of the Lombardo-Veneto kingdom it recovered its autonomy and went on its own way as a comune in its own right. At the unification of Italy, in 1861, it counted six hundred and sixty-six inhabitants — so it was by no means a handful of houses. Only in 1868 was Levata definitively annexed to Grontardo, and since then it has been the hamlet south-west of the chief town.

One need only look at the map around Grontardo to see the same story written in the names of the neighbours: Pescarolo ed Uniti, Gabbioneta-Binanuova, Gadesco-Pieve Delmona, Persico Dosimo, Scandolara Ripa d'Oglio. They are all comuni made by putting two or more villages together, exactly as Grontardo was made with Levata. In the Cremona plain the villages were many, small and close, and the nineteenth century went largely into joining them: some kept both names tied with a hyphen, others added the formula «ed Uniti», the united ones. Grontardo kept only its own. The municipal arms, on the other hand, arrived very late indeed: they were granted on 30 March 2004.