Vescovato

For a long stretch between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the word vescovatino did not simply mean someone born here: it meant a travelling trader. Many set out from this village to collect and resell the most various goods — hides, bristles, feathers, hair, everything that stock-raising and farming threw away — and in dialect they were called giràdour. During the Second World War autarky made salvaged materials valuable and that trade did even better; but there were no proper infrastructures, no credit and no insurance, and when the war ended the weaknesses came home.

Three thousand nine hundred and ninety-one inhabitants in the province of Cremona. The historic maximum is that of the 1921 census, which counted 2290 inhabitants at Vescovato and 1886 at Ca' de' Stefani, a total of 4876: more than today. Those were the years of silk at its height, of the mills and the brick kilns, and at Ca' de' Stefani the wide road to Cremona was laid out, lined with Liberty houses and gardens. The village's name is said to come from one or more bishops of Cremona who took refuge here in the early Middle Ages; from the late fourteenth century it was an imperial fief of the Gonzaga.