Brenzone sul Garda

Brenzone sul Garda has no centre and no outskirts: it is made of sixteen small hamlets spread between the lake shore and the massif of Monte Baldo, and the town hall is at Magugnano, which has about three hundred inhabitants. The lakeside hamlets — Assenza, Porto, Magugnano, Marniga, Castelletto — remain distinct but in practice form a single long village, while whole areas in between are left almost untouched; and besides the hamlets there are dozens of localities of four or five houses, many of them named beginning with Ca', that is house, followed by a surname. The most extreme case is Campo: a borgo abandoned at the beginning of the twentieth century, today inhabited by a single family, still reachable only by mule track, which has kept its medieval plan with the little church of San Pietro in Vincoli, the castle and the stream that runs through it.

The origin of the name has been debated for centuries. In 1790 the local doctor and historian Domenico Marocchi wrote that it came from the Brenzoni family, who lived at Castello: the peasants of the surrounding area, when they went to bring their share of the harvest, used to say «let's go to the Brenzoni», and from that the name was born. In the same document Marocchi notes that the comune's public records had been burned, «through carelessness, and by the French twice»: that is, the documents that might have answered the question no longer existed. Today the opposite is held to be true, namely that it was the family that took its name from the fief — a branch of the Rangoni of Modena became Brenzone. The last word on the name, in any case, was had by the inhabitants: in the referendum of 9 February 2014 about seventy per cent of those voting chose to add «sul Garda».