Castelnuovo del Garda

On 24 June 1866, during the battle of Custoza, a group of officers and soldiers of the 44th Regiment of the Forlì brigade shut themselves up in a farmhouse at Oliosi, today a hamlet of Castelnuovo del Garda, and held off the Austrian assaults for more than two hours. When the farmhouse caught fire and the ammunition ran out they decided to surrender, but first they tore the flag into thirteen pieces: each man hid one under his tunic, and the spearhead of the staff was buried under the ashes of the hearth. Once the war was over, eleven pieces out of thirteen found their way back, and the tricolour was sewn together again. On the third Sunday of June, at Oliosi, the Festa della Bandiera is still celebrated.

The town has a past of changed names behind it. In antiquity the site was called Beneventum, then Quadrivium, from its position among the four cities of Verona, Mantua, Brescia and Trento; when in the twelfth century Quadrivium was razed to the ground by Barbarossa the inhabitants built a new fortified settlement, that Castrum novum which later became Castelnuovo. From 1867 the comune was called Castelnuovo di Verona, and only in 1970 did it take its present name, on account of a strip of land on the shores of the lake. In the coat of arms the tower of the Visconti castle is held up by two lions, in memory of April 1848, when the village was sacked and burned by Radetzky's troops.