Despite the presence of famous cultivations of lemons (the meaning of limone in Italian), the town’s name is probably derived from the ancient lemos (elm) or limes (Latin: boundary, referring to the communes of Brescia and the Bishopric of Trento). Between 1863 and 1905 the denomination of the comune was Limone San Giovanni.
On 13 September 1786, the famous German poet J. Wolfgang Goethe passed by the village by boat and described with these words its lemon gardens:
