Casalromano

The hamlet of Fontanella is called Fontanella Grazioli because of a priest. Don Bartolomeo Grazioli was born there on 25 September 1804, was one of the liberals arrested by the Austrian government in 1852 and ended up shut in the castle of San Giorgio at Mantua together with Tito Speri and Carlo Montanari; the pleas for clemency, which came from Verona and from Vienna too, were refused, and on 3 March 1853 he was executed. When Austrian rule ended, his relics were divided between the two villages.

Casalromano, meanwhile, changed province by ballot. After the second war of independence it had been annexed to the province of Brescia; in 1868 the citizens decided by popular vote to go back to that of Mantua, where the comune still is — and it is the westernmost of that province. The name comes simply from a casale, a farmstead, and a personal name, Romano, but the coat of arms granted in 1934 took the matter more literally: it represents the layout of a Roman camp. Under the fields, in any case, there is antiquity enough: Neolithic pile dwellings, a tomb of the second millennium BC at Fontanella, and in September 2023 a late Iron Age necropolis of the Cenomani came to light.