Gazzuolo

In a village of two thousand four hundred inhabitants on the Oglio, at the court of Gianfrancesco Gonzaga and his wife Antonia del Balzo, there passed Matteo Bandello, Ludovico Ariosto and Baldassarre Castiglione: the author of the Novelle, the author of Orlando Furioso and the author of the Courtier, guests in the moated fortress the Gonzaga had built as his residence. It was here that the branch of the Gonzaga of Sabbioneta was born. The people of Gazzuolo had given themselves to the Gonzaga by an act of dedition in 1393; on Gianfrancesco's death Gazzuolo passed by inheritance to his son Carlo and then to his brother Ludovico III.

Of that season there remain the castle, the Gonzaga porticoes and the Palazzo Gonzaga; the church of Santa Maria Nascente is of the seventeenth century, and Casa Bergamaschi, formerly Gonzaga-Pico, of the fifteenth. Far older is the oratory of San Pietro at Belforte, which goes back to the tenth century. The village's name, on the other hand, probably comes from the Lombard gahangi. Between 1886 and 1933 Gazzuolo had a station on the Mantua-Viadana tramway; today the link with Mantua, twenty kilometres to the north-east, is made by bus.