Scandolara Ripa d'Oglio

The name says the bank of the Oglio, and the river is the reason the village stands where it does. Among the finds pulled out of this stretch there is a dugout canoe, a piroga monossile, hollowed from a single oak trunk: more than eight metres long, flat-bottomed, with a pointed prow. In the prow there are holes which, the regional record says, probably took crossbeams, so that several dugouts could be tied one beside the other — that is, made into a single wide boat. The dugouts that have come out of the Oglio have been dated by their tree rings to the early Middle Ages, and a dozen of those found in this province are kept in the civic museum of Crema.

The village was a fortified place, set to guard the Cremonese lands on the right bank of the river. The castle, probably of the fourteenth century, was a quadrangle with a courtyard in the middle, and it ended its life first as a country residence and then as a farmstead: today only the western half is still standing. In 1451 Scandolara appears among the lands subject to the city of Cremona. It was enfeoffed from 1538, and from 1665 belonged to the Ala, later Ala Ponzone, who still held it in 1751. It governed itself through a general council of everyone who paid the land tax, which met to share out the taxes and to elect two deputies, a chancellor and a consul.