San Martino dall'Argine

The village stands on the embankment, and the name says so. San Martino grew up on a rise in the ground to shelter from the floods of the Oglio, which then ran further south; later, in the Middle Ages, the river shifted north and freed the regona, the low fertile land now called the Valle d'Oglio. Ferrante Aporti, who came from here, described it thus: it lies «on its most elevated part, which has the look of a very high embankment seen from the floor of the valley».

The name appears for the first time in a diploma of 958 of the kings of Italy Berengar II and Adalbert, confirming the place to the Benedictine monastery of Leno; in full — Sancto Martino in Arzene — it can be read in a diploma of Conrad II of 1036. And it was precisely in the woods near the abbey's lands, on 7 May 1052, that Boniface, the father of Matilda of Canossa, was killed by an arrow in an ambush while hunting: some say in the woods of San Martino, others in those of Spineda. These lands, for that matter, were Brescian, then Cremonese and only in the end Mantuan — and to the diocese of Cremona they still belong today.