Archaelogical discoveries dated back to the Bronze Age (2000-1800 BC) indicate the presence of human settlements that characterize the so called ‘Polada culture’ in Lake Garda’s morainal amphitheatre.
Between the first and the second century AD the lake shores were chosen as the country seat of many well-to-do Romans, as evidenced by the villa discovered in Desenzano in 1921 exactly on the Via Emilia, the ancient road which joined Brescia to Verona.
During the Longobard period Desenzano was part of a district which covered the southern shores of the lake and the Mantuan countryside.The Pieve was one of the first Christian churches in the area. At first it was under the authority of Verona, then, in 1192, it passed within the civil jurisdiction of Brescia, and finally it became a feudal possession of the Confalonieri family in 1220. Around 1170 Niceta spread the Cathar heresy in the surroundings: Sirmione and Desenzano, where the heresy had also a Cathar theologian and bishop, became centres of worship till the intervention of the Inquisition in 1276.
In the quarrel between Guelfs and Ghibellines the latter found shelter in Desenzano Castle but in the end they were overpowered.

From 1426 Desenzano fell under the rule of Venice, the Magnifica Patria (magnificent country) and became an important cultural and commercial centre, especially thanks to its corn market; in 1449 public lessons were already held here, and an Academy was founded in the 16th century.  During the French invasion of the League of Cambrai, Desenzano refused to yield to the Cardinal of Amboise and asked for the protection of  Mantua, but it had to submit to Louis XII.  From 1512 to 1516 there were several plunders by the imperial troops of the Habsburgs. The 16th century brought about other misfortunes such as the passage of the Landsknechts and the plague of 1567.  In 1772 Desenzano succeeded in obtaining independence from Salò after almost 350 years of conflicts.  Following the Jacobin revolution of 1797 it became base of the Department of Benacus (the ancient denomination of Lake Garda).

With the Restoration the Austrians controlled the Kingdom of Lombardy and Venetia and Desenzano was raised to first class town; the Austrian Emperor Francis I visited it both in 1816 and 1821.
In 1859 Napoleon III and Victor Emmanuel II fought against the Austro-Hungarian forces at San Martino and Solferino. The carnage during the battle gave birth to Henry Dunant’s Red Cross whose unique museum is a few kilometres from Desenzano in Castiglione delle Stiviere. The tragic event turned Desenzano into a huge hospital.
Both in the First and in the Second World War, Desenzano suffered heavy air raids, which destroyed, in the latter one, the railway viaduct built in 1852.

A sightseer or a resident finds it easy to trace the crucial historical moments of this joyful lake town although in broad outline. If you only try to look towards the monuments or the archaeological areas which are evidence of life in the past.

We start our tour getting through the oriental door of the old village.  The archaeological museum is close to the lake, exactly where in the past stood the original cloister of  S. Maria de Senioribus.  The museum is dedicated to Giovanni Rambotti, the scholar who discovered the prehistoric settlement of the ‘Polada culture’ (2000 BC). From the finds, jealously kept in display cabinets, you can assume that the first human settlements of this region date back to an epoch between the Mesolithic Age (8000 BC) and the Bronze Age (2000 BC). To the latter age belongs the most important find of the whole archaeological exhibition: the most ancient plough of wood in the world, discovered at Lavagnone to the south of Desenzano and extracted in good condition thanks to the environment without oxygen, typical of peat bogs.

If you continue on the lakeside, toward the western part of the old town, a visit to the archaeological area of the Roman Villa is a must. Its ruins - dating back to different periods between the end of the Republican Age (I century BC) and the end of the Imperial Age (V century AD) - extend for about a hectare and represent the most important example in Northern Italy of a large, late-Roman Villa. It is doubtless an elaborate, east-facing building of large extent, whose residential parts alternate with rustic structures. The large villa overlooked the lake and the lake must have been the decisive element in the layout of the various rooms.The main paths of the villa were oriented orthogonally to the coast.
Moreover the villa had doubtless its embranchments on the lake. They were made up by piers and wharves and perhaps by pools (piscinae) for fish farming to complete the chances to have a good time and to exploit the lake environment. If you observe the mosaic depicting various scenes of a pagan nature, you will be enraptured by their beauty for the richness of the colours of the mosaic stones: cupid grape-pickers, cupids on bigas in trials, maenads and satyrs, wild beasts assailing animals, allegories of the four seasons, or a character (Orpheus, or the good shepherd) with a dog and a sheep in a bucolic landscape.

The Roman Age came to an end with the invasion of German and oriental peoples who also destroyed the villa. The Castle was built on the foundation of quadrangular Roman castrum sometime during the 10th century to reduce the plunder and devastation caused by a new race of barbarians: the Hungarians. It is situated on the hill that dominates the harbour and a large part of the surrounding area. The inside of building was made up of a proper small village with its roads, the square, the tower and the church dedicated to S. Ambrogio. What remains of the original defensive structure is only the rampart and a building used as military barracks constructed in 1883.

If you go down along Via Castello, the quickest and steepest way that connects the upper town with the lower part, you will arrive in the main square: Piazza Malvezzi.  Here everything harks back to the Venetian rule. Here the most important corn market in Lombardy took place, at first each Monday and then each Tuesday under the strictest control of the Venetian authority. Closely related to the main square the economy of Desenzano was based on the port. Today it is called Porto Vecchio (old harbour). It was built at the end of the 15th century using huge rocks and stones as filling material. It was re-done and enlarged by the Doge Andrea Gritti at the beginning of the 16th century.  Some buildings rose on the new embankments with roomy warehouses to stockpile corn. This large and fortified port could handle merchant boats carrying olive oil, citrus fruits, wine and wool cloth from the northern part of the lake where they returned loaded with grain.

The unfinished Palazzo del Provveditore (palace of the superintendent) is halfway under the arcades facing the main square, where the steep road to the castle begins; it is the testimony of the conflict broken out between five villages of the coast (Desenzano, Rivoltella, Padenghe, Pozzolengo e Bedizzole) and Salò, where the Venetian superintendent was sent every sixteen months from Venice.  The former towns had often asked Venice for their own particular superintendent between 1532 and 1588 to escape from the jurisdiction of Salò. For that reason the inhabitants of Desenzano, obviously confident of the acceptance of the claim, commissioned the project for the Venetian authority’s residence to a local architect, Mr Todeschini, and began the construction work but it was stopped when the Venetian Senate rejected the claim. So the third arcade of the palace has never been built.  The construction of the Granarolo was began and carried out by Todeschini in the second half of the 16th century. It was a wide pillared arcade surrounding on two sides a series of warehouses overlooking the port. On the second floor the Casa del Comune (town hall) would have been built, but the project was never finished and today it is the base of the Palazzo del Turismo.

The Venetian rule came to an end with the Napoleonic invasion in 1796 and officially finished on 18th March 1797. On the 20th May of the same year the local Jacobins pulled down the statue of  S. Angela Merici, which had been raised in the middle of the main square since 1782, and carried it to the local parish. In place of the statue they put the “Tree of Liberty”, symbol of the French Revolution, i.e. a pole painted in the French national colours and topped by a Phrygian cap.
However the statue was put exactly where it was before three years later, when the Austrians re-conquered all the territory which had been part of Veneto, taking advantage of Napoleon’s absence during the Egyptian campaign.

Our short tour finishes in San Martino, a spot to the south of Desenzano. Here the French troops gave a heavy toll in human life to Italian independence.
The tower, more than 65 metres high, was raised in 1893 and commemorates the battle of June 24th 1859, when the French and the Piedmontese armies faced the Austro-Hungarian forces for fifteen hours (from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m.).
The battle was extremely bloody and the cost in human life was enormous: over 25.000 dead and 15.000 injured. It was fought on two fronts: the north one around San Martino, where the Piedmontese army under Victor Emmanuel II’s orders forced back the Austrians; the south one, around the stronghold of Solferino, where Napoleon III sent the four divisions of his Guard among the corps under the command of Baraguay D’Hilliers and by Mac Mahon.
Today, if you go up the tower on a clear day, you can see a fascinating and spectacular sight: the lake, the mountains all around it, the morainal hills with their vineyards and olive groves which form a harmonious and unforgettable whole.

AUTORI della traduzione

Comune di Desenzano d/Garda

PROGETTO ONDE