Montebello di Bertona

There is a prehistoric culture that carries the name of this village: the Bertonian. Between 1949 and 1953 the doctor and scholar Giovanni Battista Leopardi found at Campo delle Piane, on a plateau to the right of the Gàllero torrent, the remains of a settlement of huts standing on the ground: it was the first time in Italy that open-air dwellings were documented — huts covered with skins and plant material — used by people of the upper palaeolithic. The Bertonian goes back about eighteen thousand years and reaches the threshold of the Neolithic, covering nearly eight thousand years, and it is recognised by its flint tools: blades, points, scrapers and burins of large size. Those people lived by hunting and moved with the game, high up in summer and in the valleys in winter; in the cold season they stayed in the caves, and there, in the long still hours, they prepared the tools for the good season.

The name of the village, by comparison, is simple: mons and bellus, the fair hill, and in a document of 1062 it appears as «poio de Montebello»; some later writers also call it Belmonte, putting the adjective first to say at once the thing that matters, which is the view. The second half of the name arrived much later: until the royal decree of 1863 the village was only Montebello, and «di Bertona» comes from a medieval personal name brought to Italy by the Franks, Bertho, though there is no lack of those who trace it to a temple of Vesta built up here by the Vestini in flight. At Campo Mirabello, meanwhile, bronze vases have come to light, earrings, necklaces, Attic cups in black glaze and rare black-figure kylikes, which reached this far from the Greek world, together with votive bronze statuettes: one of them shows Hercules, and it is of the sixth or fifth century before Christ.