Barbata

The name appears for the first time in a document of 875, when Lothair the First confirms to the Brescian monastery of Santa Giulia its rights over the curte de Barbada; the grant is restated in a deed of 950. Already in the ninth century the village was ringed by a fortification, later enlarged between the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Of that stronghold there remain only traces of the entrance tower and of the battlements, because the building was absorbed into a farmstead: the castle ended up inside a barn.

Barbata lies on the plain along a border, and it has changed sides more than once. After a brief spell as a free commune it passed to the Visconti, then in the fifteenth century to Venice, which cleared land here and dug irrigation canals; then came the raids of the Sforza, and when Milan prevailed the village, which already belonged to the diocese of Cremona, was placed in the county of Cremona as well. It was Napoleon who set it where it is today, among the Bergamasque municipalities. The coat of arms, granted in 2000, carries the colours of Bergamo and a cow, for the cattle that still sustain the local economy.