Brescia Audio Tours

Brescia earned its nickname, the Lioness of Italy, during ten days in March 1849 when the city rose against Austrian occupation and held out for ten days before being suppressed at considerable cost to both sides. The defiance was extreme enough that Tennyson wrote a poem about it. This is a city with a habit of resistance: it also survived a French sack in 1512 that killed thousands, a catastrophic gunpowder explosion in 1769 that destroyed one-sixth of the city and killed three thousand people, and a 1974 neo-fascist bombing on the Piazza della Loggia that killed eight. Brescia absorbs its disasters and continues.

What the city rarely publicizes enough is its Roman inheritance.

The Roman forum at the heart of Brescia is one of the best-preserved assemblies of Roman public buildings in northern Italy, and it includes a Capitolium temple from 73 AD that sheltered the famous bronze Winged Victory statue for fifteen centuries before it was found during excavations in 1826. The UNESCO-listed San Salvatore-Santa Giulia monastery complex nearby holds the Cross of Desiderius, studded with gems and ancient cameos, and the 8th-century Brescia Casket, an ivory reliquary of almost impossible delicacy. This is not a city that requires you to imagine the past -- it keeps bringing it out.