Robecco d'Oglio

Robecco stood on the border, and the border gave it everything. In 1185 Cremona made it a free borough, with considerable privileges in exchange for absolute loyalty to the city's policy; two years later a castle was built here, because beyond the Oglio began the territory of Brescia. How much it mattered is told by a document of 1306: in the church now dedicated to Santi Giuseppe e Biagio the podestà of Cremona signed a peace treaty with those of Brescia, Mantua and Verona. Earlier still, in Roman times, the via Brixiana passed through, the consular road that linked the river port of Cremona to Brescia, from where the roads fanned out across the whole of Cisalpine Gaul.

The border is still here, but it has become something shared: the station on the Brescia-Cremona line is called Robecco-Pontevico and serves the two villages on the two banks, and the motorway junction carries both names although it lies in Pontevico's territory. In the village, the tower was begun in 1853 and its spire finished only in 1932; the church of Santi Giuseppe e Biagio, the one of the treaty, was opened in its present form in 1895; the town hall is in Villa Barni Della Scala, with its seventeenth-century park; and at Monasterolo the ruins remain of a great tower of the year one thousand.