Scandolara Ravara

The most important Roman find in the village is a stone that travelled. It is the funerary altar of Ilumvius, and it is made of granite: a rock found only hundreds of kilometres from the sands and clays of the lower Cremona plain. It is also so like the altars found around Este — ancient Ateste, near Padua — that several scholars think it may have been carried here or reused. The tribe Ilumvius was enrolled in, the Romilia, is that of the legionaries who after decades of war received fertile lands precisely at Ateste, after 31 before Christ. Ateste and the Cremona country were, after all, joined by two great routes of antiquity: the Po, then far more powerful than today, and the via Postumia, which passed half an hour's walk from here.

The name is made of water. Scandolara might come from scandola, a wild grain of the area, or from the scandole, the wooden shingles once laid between the beams and the tiles; but the best-supported hypothesis is the Lombard scadan, which means island or land next to a watercourse — and that agrees with Ravara, from the Latin Riparia, that is «on the banks», the banks of the Po. The proof lies in the other Scandolare: Scandolara Ripa d'Oglio, in this same province, and the Scandolara that is a hamlet of Zero Branco, near Treviso, on the river Zero. The oldest name of this village was in fact Scandolara Ripa di Po, later turned into Riparia and at last, through the Cremonese dialect, into Ravara. The church built around 1100 over older buildings probably stood on an embankment road that defended the countryside from the river.