Sospiro

The name sounds like a feeling and is in fact a measurement. Sospiro comes from the Latin sex pilae, six milestones: that was the number separating the village from Cremona, and the count became the place name. The rest of the local toponymy carries on in its own way: among the eighteenth-century farmsteads scattered through the fields are the Colombarolo, the Casaletto, the Orezoletta and one called Bruciacuore, heartburn. Lined up on the map they sound like the lines of a song, and they speak instead of dovecotes, of houses and of distances.

In the village is the seat of the Fondazione Istituto Ospedaliero di Sospiro, one of the largest bodies in Lombardy for the care and assistance of people with disabilities and of the elderly; in 2005 the foundation refurbished a large hotel at Toscolano Maderno, on Lake Garda, to bring the people in its care there. Between 1888 and 1954 the municipality was served by two stops of the Cremona-Casalmaggiore tramway and by a station in the Longardore district. Three thousand two hundred and thirty-six inhabitants in the province of Cremona.