Ponti sul Mincio

Ponti sul Mincio is an anomaly inside its own province. Mantua is Gonzaga country, but this village never had anything to do with them: since the Middle Ages it was a Venetian municipality of the province of Verona, and it appears for the first time in 1145 in a list of the parish churches of the Veronese diocese. It ended up in Lombardy by Napoleon's decision: having ceded Venice to Austria, he kept Ponti for military reasons — the same reasons that lie in its name. Then it changed again: after 1859 it passed to the province of Verona, in 1866 it returned to that of Mantua, and only in 1977 did the diocese move from Verona to Mantua. It took nearly two centuries to finish changing sides. The present name dates from 1867: before that it was simply Ponte.

Above the village stands the Scaliger castle, built between 1260 and 1276: a "castello recinto", polygonal and elongated, closed by five towers, two of them true buildings and the others recesses in the walkway of the walls. Once its defensive purpose was gone, the inside of the walls was used as a vegetable garden until recent times. On Monte Casale, instead, on 30 April 1945, one of the last engagements of the war in Italy was fought: the partisan brigades Italia and Avesani with the Arditi of the ninth unit against a German anti-aircraft battery. Five Arditi died, three partisans and one American soldier, Richard Carlson; in 2008 the village named the municipal playground after him.