Azzone

Azzone lies in the Valle di Scalve, on the left of the Dezzo torrent, and in the Bergamo dialect it is called simply Sù. The name comes from Some, which marked an old inhabited place — and a locality called Some still exists in the comune —, then became Zono and at last Azzone. Charlemagne gave the whole area to the monks of Tours, who exchanged it with the bishop of Bergamo, who invested the captains of Scalve with it; but those captains were in fact set aside by the birth of the Universitas of Scalve, a small feudal institution that looked like a republic: it guaranteed the inhabitants exemption from military service, freedom to hunt and fish, tax relief and the right to work the mines of the valley. When Venice arrived in the fifteenth century the privileges remained, and the Scalve villages formed the Great Community of Scalve. An autonomous comune under the Cisalpine Republic, Azzone was then merged back into Vilminore, came back to itself after the French, and in 1927 the fascist regime joined it to Colere under the name of Dezzo di Scalve: the final separation is of 1947.

But the date this valley does not forget is another. On the first of December 1923, a little after seven in the morning, the keeper of the Gleno dam saw stones falling and a crack opening in one of the pillars; the crack widened fast and took away eighty of the dam's two hundred and sixty metres, releasing six million cubic metres of water. The wave came down from the reservoir at fifteen hundred metres to Lake Iseo in half an hour. It struck Bueggio first, passing over the church, then Dezzo, which is a hamlet of Azzone: the part facing Colere was completely destroyed, the sanctuary of the Madonnina included. The houses below Azzone were partly protected by a spur of rock. The dead were three hundred and fifty-six in all, and the count has never been certain; at Dezzo, which had five hundred inhabitants, two hundred and nine died. Today the comune includes the nature reserve of the Boschi del Giovetto, set up in 1985 to protect the wood ant, and on its arms it bears the fourteenth-century civic tower with three stars: one for Azzone, one for Dezzo, one for Dosso.