Volongo

Volongo is, together with Ostiano, one of only two comuni of the province of Cremona that extend north of the Oglio: it stands, that is, on the Brescian side of the river, and its papers say the same thing. From 1785 to 1817 it was aggregated to the neighbouring comune of Ostiano, and until 1872 it belonged to the province of Brescia; the speech confirms it too, because here Lombard is spoken in its Brescian variety. The name is probably a description of the ground: from an old Vadum Longum, long ford, because this was marshy country and the bed of the Gambara ran long. Traces of the Roman age remain, when there was probably an important military garrison here; then, around the year one thousand, with the reclamation campaigns of the Po plain, the territory came into the orbit of the Benedictine abbey of Leno, and later passed to Pandolfo III Malatesta, to the Visconti and finally to the Gonzaga.

Out of this village of a few hundred people came two women who changed the way Italian children are taught: the Agazzi sisters, Rosa, born in 1866, and Carolina, born in 1870, pioneers of infant education and of pedagogy. The municipal nursery school, built in their memory in 1950, is called the Agazziana. For the rest: the parish church of Santi Pietro e Paolo has a core of the mid-fifteen hundreds, modified over the two centuries that followed, and inside it is the chapel of the Madonna del Campanile, made in memory of an apparition believed to have taken place around the sixteenth century. There are the porticoes of the centre and the ecomuseum of the valleys of the Oglio and the Chiese. Flax and rice were grown here, thanks to the water of the two rivers, and mulberries for the silkworm. On the seventeenth of January the bonfire of Sant'Antonio abate is lit; on Christmas night the procession goes to the crib set up on the river.