Medole

In 1481 a court sentence split the inhabitants of Medole in two. On one side the natives, the men of the commune; on the other the Brescians who had arrived en masse in the second half of the fifteenth century, probably fleeing a famine in the valleys, who were called men of the mill and treated as foreigners: to stop being so, their line had to have completed 150 years since the founder settled here. In 1570 the 110 families of the men of the mill petitioned the Duke of Mantua to ease those conditions, and the petition was rejected. Nobody knows when the division ended: it probably died out by itself in the seventeenth century, when the 150 years were up.

Four thousand and thirty-eight inhabitants in the province of Mantua, at the foot of the moraine hills of Lake Garda. A great deal of fighting has happened on this plain: in 1706 during the War of the Spanish Succession, in 1796 between Napoleon and Wurmser, and on the twenty-fourth of June 1859, when the battle of Medole opened the day of Solferino and San Martino. The last was on the second of July 1866, a limited clash between Italian and Austrian cavalry units which was given considerable prominence, probably to make up for the defeats of that war: since then the main square has been called Piazza della Vittoria, Victory Square.