Marmirolo

Marmirolo first appears in a document of 970; a Canossa possession, it passed to Mantua in 1055 by imperial diploma. The village was then split into three quarters, del Castello, delle Lame and dei Ronchi, and it was in the Ronchi quarter, in the summer of 1328, that the plot against the Bonacolsi was laid that handed Mantua to the Gonzaga. The castle has gone, but survives on the town arms: a red crenellated tower between two trees.

The Gonzaga held Marmirolo into the eighteenth century and built, outside the castle walls, a palace begun by Gianfrancesco in 1435 and enlarged by his successors into a summer and hunting residence; the emperor Charles V came here to hunt. The palace was then abandoned and pulled down in the eighteenth century, leaving only the tower on the square. What survives from that age is the lodge the Dattaro built for Duke Vincenzo I in the Bosco della Fontana, the last patch of forest that once covered the Po plain.