Algua

Algua has not been in one piece since the eleventh of March 1948: when the comune of Costa Serina was re-established, the new one cut this one in two, and at their nearest the two parts are more than one thousand six hundred metres apart in a straight line. The chief town, moreover, is the town hall and about ten houses: the people live in the four hamlets — Pagliaro, Sambusita, Rigosa and Frerola — which the coat of arms records as four gold stars. Those arms were designed in our own day by a painter of the Val Brembana, and they carry a letter A, a jet of water for the countless springs, and a dry beech trunk from which an olive branch is sprouting: it comes from the legend of the sanctuary of the Madonna del Perello, where by tradition the Madonna appeared to a peasant in 1413.

The name too is water: some take it from acqua, for the springs and streams this valley is so rich in, others from a ford on the Serina — al guado, later shortened to Algua. The village is old: in the quarter of Pagliaro there are Roman remains, from the time when the whole Val Serina was gathered under the municipium of Bergamo. In the Middle Ages there were plenty of brawls between one hamlet and the next, but they were quarrels of bell towers, and had nothing to do with the fighting between Guelphs and Ghibellines that tore other parts of the Bergamo country. In 1888 a landslide struck the settlement of Truchel and killed: the same slide blocked the course of the Serina and formed a small lake, which is still there and is called the little lake of Algua. And in the church of Pagliaro, in 1494, the building was enlarged and its axis turned round by half a circle.