Sanguinetto

Tradition holds that the name comes from the bloody battles fought over this stretch of plain, but it more probably comes from a shrub, the Cornus sanguinea, the dogwood with red berries; the place name is documented as early as a charter of 930. The Scaligeri had the castle built in the fourteenth century, and in 1377 they granted it in fief to the soldier Jacopo Dal Verme; in 1432 his son Luigi obtained from the emperor Sigismund the title of Count of Sanguinetto, with a very long list of villages and territories attached. Five years later Venice confiscated the lot and auctioned the villages off.

The fief then passed to Gentile di Leonessa, who left it by will to his nephew, the son of his sister and of Erasmo da Narni, the Gattamelata; on his death it went to the husbands of Gentile's three natural daughters, and from then on it was divided into carati, ever smaller shares. In the church of the Rotonda, built in 1747 to a design by Alessandro Pompei, eleven masses are still said in a single day every eleventh of July, for the end of a plague.