Ambivere

The name Ambivere comes from the Ambivareti, Gaulish tribes who came here from the Loire in the third century BC; the Romans made it a garrison on the military road linking Bergamo to Como, the last stretch of the one that came from Friuli and the Rhaetian lands. The first written documents are from the year 923. In the Middle Ages the village found itself in the middle of the Guelph and Ghibelline struggles and provided itself with a castle and several towers; when the Visconti won, the castle was pulled down along with everything that could serve for war. The coat of arms, taken from an old emblem found in Michele Pagano's armorial of 1626, keeps the tower, the wall and the black eagle, which was the sign of loyalty to the emperor. Where the castle stood the people later built the sanctuary of the Madonna del Castello, reached by a staircase of more than five hundred steps.

The hardest page is from the twentieth century. On 1 December 1943, under the German occupation and the Italian Social Republic, the carabinieri arrested at Ambivere the seven members of the Levi family, well-off Jews who had long lived in the village and ran its pharmacy: it is the largest group of Jews arrested in the whole province of Bergamo. All their property, movable and immovable, was promptly seized by the local Fascio. Much later, and in a minor key, the village had another story of things taken and found again: in 1983 an eighteenth-century painting of Saint Thomas, a chased chalice and some small oval pictures of the Apostles disappeared from the sanctuary; the painting was recovered on 11 February 1992.