Redondesco

In this comune's coat of arms there is a round stool, and it is the fault of a reading. The oldest documents call the village Radoldeschio — so an imperial diploma of 982 — and Radaldisco in another of 1055; in later texts the form Rotundiscus often appears, which somebody read as «desco rotondo», the round table, thinking of the round shape of the village or of the castle, and from that reading the comune's arms were born: a round wooden stool on a green and blue ground. Beffa-Negrini, to be exact, turned the reasoning round and derived the name from the arms. A document of 22 February 884 would instead call the place Aprehensa Gardondesca, and for somebody that Aprehensa indicates a territory of round shape surrounded by water; Guerrini, for his part, notes that the prefix re- always comes from rivus, river, and that edon means «round»: Redondesco would say, in short, that the village is bathed all round by rivers, and indeed it is watered by the Tartaro Fabrezza and by the vaso Fuga, the two Tartari of the western Mantuan plain.

Two large claims circulate about this village. The first: according to some, Redondesco would correspond to ancient Andes, the birthplace of Virgil, and the argument is toponymic — Andes, as a Celtic name, had the accent on the last vowel and would originally have been Arandès, like a great many Celtic place names with the suffix in Ar-, and it is precisely that Arandès, romanised into Andes, that would sit inside the name Redondesco. The second: recent studies, of 2014, have proposed, again on a toponymic basis, that the battle of the Campi Raudii, where the Cimbri were annihilated, took place in the strip between Redondesco, which in Lombard times was Raudaldisco, and Rodigo, which was Raudingo — names that both recall the «raudi» fields near the via Postumia, on the road the Cimbri would have taken coming down from the Brenner; and not far away, in the comune of Castellucchio, there is a locality called Cimbriolo. It is a hypothesis that Ganelli and Agnelli, in the seventeenth century, had already held. What is documented, instead, is the church: from the diploma of Otto II of 982 it is known that part of Redondesco belonged to the canons of Santa Maria of Cremona, and one of Henry III of 1005 confirms to the bishop of Mantua the plebem de Radaldisto; in 1145 a papal bull in favour of the bishop of Verona names here a church of San Zenone, near the bank of the Tartaro.