Upper Mantua

Upper Mantua is a geographical area located northwest of the city of Mantua in the province of the same name and bordering the provinces of Brescia and Verona, bordered to the north by the morainic hills of Lake Garda, to the east by the province of Verona, to the northwest by the province of Brescia, and to the south by the plains of Middle Mantua.
The most significant centers are Castiglione delle Stiviere, Castel Goffredo, and Asola, in whose areas the clothing industry was particularly developed, employing about 7,500 people in 2013. The northern part of Mantua is influenced - in its dialectal inflection, traditions, historical events, religious upbringing, even political choices - by its proximity above all to the province of Brescia and, in part, to that of Verona. The area has a typically agricultural economy, although the post-World War II years saw an increase in industrial production and a lively tertiary activity.

Territorial extent and municipalities

Upper Mantua is bounded to the west and east by the Chiese and Mincio rivers respectively, to the north by the morainic hills of Lake Garda, while its southern borders are marked by the mid-Mantuan plain crossed by the Via Postumia.
Historically, politically and civilly, most of its component municipalities have become part of the Mantuan territory only since about the 15th century, while others have become part of it since the 19th century. On the religious level, the majority of the parishes of Upper Mantua until the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century were included in the diocese of Brescia. From a linguistic point of view, a dialect is spoken in the area that, unlike Mantuan, belongs to the group of Lombard dialects and is markedly similar to Brescian.
The northwestern area of the province of Mantua, a territory of fifteen to twenty municipalities mostly already belonging mainly to Brescia, but partly also to Verona, has always retained its own historical and political specificity, and is therefore historically characterized by centrifugal tendencies in relation to Mantua and the rest of its province.
From the official classification of the Province of Mantua, Upper Mantua is an area that groups 14 municipalities:

Municipality	In Upper Mantuan dialect	Surface area	Population
Casalmoro	Casalmòr	13 km²	2 162
Casaloldo	Casalòlt	16,84 km²	2 678
Casalromano	Casarimà	11 km²	1 480
Castel Goffredo	Castèl	42,24 km²	12 574
Castiglione delle Stiviere	Castiù	42,09 km²	23 378
Cavriana	Cavriàna	36 km²	3 710
Ceresara	Sareşére	37 km²	2 526
Goito	Gùit	78,82 km²	10 050
Guidizzolo	Ghidisöl	22 km²	5 919
Medole	Médule	25 km²	4 107
Monzambano	Mosambàn	29 km²	4 934
Ponti sul Mincio	Pónti	11,50 km²	2 317
Solferino	Sulfrì	13 km²	2 664
Volta Mantovana	la Ólta	50,31 km²	7 218

Other municipalities, otherwise included in the Middle-West Mantua, are often commonly included in the current concept of Upper Mantua. They are:

Municipality	In Upper Mantuan dialect	Surface area	Population
Acquanegra sul Chiese	'Quanégra	28 km²	2 795
Asola	Àsula	73 km²	9 996
Canneto sull'Oglio	Cané	25 km²	4 245
Gazoldo degli Ippoliti	Gasòlt	12 km²	2 947
Mariana Mantovana	Mariàna	8 km²	794
Piubega	Piübega	16 km²	1 692
Redondesco	Redundèsch	19 km²	1 215

The latter municipalities are all located north of - or at most straddling - the Via Postumia, an ancient Roman road axis that can be taken as an ideal dividing line between Upper Mantua and the rest of Mantua. For the latter classification, which includes more municipalities in Upper Mantua, one can see the news sections in the local newspapers Gazzetta di Mantova and La Voce di Mantova and the Magazine Alto Mantovano column on the television station Telemantova.
The Provincial Territorial Coordination Plan of the Province of Mantua, which identifies elements of homogeneity related to environmental features and a historical reading of the settlement system, and highlights a common matrix in terms of cultural values, also describes Upper Mantua, classified as "Circondario A," consisting of 21 municipalities.
The vast majority of municipalities have a population of between 1,000 and 10,000. Only Castiglione delle Stiviere exceeds 20 000 inhabitants, while three municipalities - Castel Goffredo, Goito and Asola - have a population between 10 000 and 20 000; finally, Mariana Mantovana does not reach 1 000 and is the least populous municipality in the entire province of Mantua.
Despite such classifications, the definition of the upper Mantuan territory remains quite subjective due to the fact that, despite its uniformity, it remains primarily a geographic-cultural region without real political references, nor has it ever been an autonomous political-religious entity in the past.
The very concept and terminology of Upper Mantua came to be formed rather late in history and essentially the relation to the position and role it occupied within the province of Mantua.
From a historical, religious, cultural and linguistic point of view, the lands currently referred to as Upper Mantua gravitated in the past mainly within the sphere of influence of Brescia or Verona. Even after the coming of the influence exerted by Mantua, mainly due to the Gonzaga family, Upper Mantua often configured itself as a periphery sector or appendix within the Mantuan state, even maintaining its own autonomy, in the case of fiefdoms ruled by lineages independent of Mantua.
The criteria taken into consideration to define Upper Mantua can be diverse:

Historic-ecclesiastical: this would refer to and include the territories that remained for much of the common era under the administrative dependencies - not only civil, but also religious - of the cities of Brescia and Verona, instead of Mantua. In such a wide historical span, however, there were many political and civil changes and alternations, which make a definition based only on this criterion tenuous. Simplifying and referring only to much of the medieval and modern periods, the lands corresponding to the municipalities of: Casalmoro, Casaloldo, Casalromano, Castel Goffredo, Castiglione delle Stiviere, Guidizzolo, Medole, Solferino, Acquanegra sul Chiese, Asola, Canneto sull'Oglio, Mariana Mantovana, and Redondesco. These territories were included until the 18th-19th centuries in the diocese of Brescia and until the late Middle Ages - but some even beyond - in the district headed by the same city - duchy, county, or medieval commune. In the early Middle Ages some of these towns, those further north, were included in the duchy and episcopate of Verona. Added to these municipalities are Monzambano and Ponti sul Mincio, which since Roman times have always gravitated to the Verona orbit, civilly until the 19th century, and religiously even until the 20th.
Geographic: this is the criterion most often followed in studies and publications concerning Upper Mantua, which often tend to restrict this notion to the hilly or foothill sector only, disregarding historical considerations. The geographical criterion can refer to altimetrical altitude - thus upper in the sense of elevated -, and in that case it includes only hilly municipalities and at most those immediately on the slopes of the morainic reliefs: Castiglione delle Stiviere, Guidizzolo, Medole, Solferino, Monzambano, Ponti sul Mincio, Cavriana, Volta Mantovana; alternatively, upper can be considered in the sense of situated north of the rest of the province of Mantua. Even in the latter case, however, since the morainic hills are located in the very northernmost belt of the province, it is essentially the same municipalities just listed that are involved, at most with some greater extension toward the plain, affecting in particular Castel Goffredo, Goito, Ceresara, Casaloldo, Casalmoro, and Casalromano, as in the classification of the province of Mantua.
Linguistic: finally, one can consider the territories in which variants of the Brescian dialect - the so-called Upper Mantuan dialects, or, marginally, of the Veronese dialect - are spoken, as opposed to the Mantuan dialect spoken in the capital and its surrounding area and various transitional dialects that can be placed practically halfway between Brescian and Mantuan. According to this criterion, one would have Upper Mantua composed of: Casalmoro, Casaloldo, Casalromano, Castel Goffredo, Castiglione delle Stiviere, Guidizzolo, Medole, Solferino, Acquanegra sul Chiese, Asola, Canneto sull'Oglio, Mariana Mantovana, Ceresara, Cavriana, Volta Mantovana, Ponti sul Mincio, Monzambano, and Piubega. Excluded would be Gazoldo degli Ippoliti, Goito, and Redondesco, where the dialect is transitional between Brescia and Mantua and is now close to the latter.