Marcaria - town centre

The Municipality of Marcaria is the second largest, in terms of how far it extends, in the province of Mantua (9970 hectares) and is situated on the lowland to the left of the river Oglio, which flows through both to the west and the south.
The area, inhabited since the Neolithic, subjected to the splitting up of its lands by the Romans in 41 B.C., was abandoned almost completely during the Barbarian invasions. It was only in Carolingian times that Marcaria and Campitello emerged from documents as separate entities (curtes), belonging to the monastery of the nuns of Saint Giulia of Brescia. Such a separation lasted for almost the whole of the Middle Ages until the area of Mantua was reorganised into vicariates in the fourteenth century by the Gonzaga’s, who annexed Campitello to Marcaria and linked the two towns in an unpopular administrative amalgamation for the centuries to come.
Situated within the cemetery walls, the millenary little church of Saint John has a single nave and contains frescoes of the XIV and XV centuries including a very interesting fragmentary cycle of the Mantegna school perhaps attributable to Bernardino Mantegna, son of the very famous artist.
The parish church, rebuilt in a fine Baroque style between the beginning of 1708 and 1722,it houses an altar-piece by Felice Cignaroli with the "Virgin and Saints" (1767) and the high altar-piece with the Baptism of Christ attributed to Ippolito Costa ( 1554-1561). In the surrounding area we find the Marcaria Peat bogs (Regional Nature Reserve), today situated within the Oglio South Park, which for a long time were destined to the collection of peat, and which are formed by a bog covered in cane thickets recreating a natural environment similar to that which was once the natural landscape of these plains.
At least two noteworthy people where born here: Baldassarre Castiglioni author of Il Cortegiano, who was born in Casatico on 6 December 1478 and Tristano Martinelli, the first and true inventor of Arlecchino’s mask who was born near the main town on 7th April 1557. To be mentioned among the citizens of Marcaria, and whose remains are still kept here today, the patriots of the Risorgimento, Giuseppe Finzi (Canicossa) and Francesco Siliprandi (Casatico).