Adrara San Rocco

Adrara appears around the year one thousand as a single village. It was the wars between Guelphs and Ghibellines that filled these side valleys with people in flight, and that led to a castle being built to protect them; when Venice arrived, in the fifteenth century, the factions died down and the place began to grow again. At that point, though, the quarrel moved indoors: the upper village, gathered round the parish of San Rocco, against the lower one, gathered round the church of San Martino. In 1668 Adrara became two comuni, but dividing the land went on for nearly a century: it was formalised only in 1754, with five ninths of the territory to San Martino and four ninths to San Rocco.

And even then the matter was not closed. Making the church of San Rocco a parish of its own was difficult not only because the people of San Martino opposed it, but because the people of San Rocco did too, obstinately continuing to regard themselves as parishioners of San Martino. The church dates from 1539 and its bell tower was raised between 1770 and 1777: it is that bell tower the comune put on its arms in 1971, copying an image already in the Stemmario Camozzi of 1888. Outside the village stands the sanctuary of Saints Faustino and Giovita, known here as the sanctuary of the dead of Bondo: it is of the fourteenth century, but restoration has found traces a good deal older. And in 1870 Eugenio Donadoni was born here, the literary critic and biographer of Italian poets.