Barzana

The name of Barzana is thought to come from the prefix barz, which meant a pen for livestock, with the Latin ending -ana: a village born as a cattle fold, in short. On the coat of arms, granted in 1975, there is then a single tower standing for three, since it alludes to the original settlements of Barzana, Arzenate and Casavoglio. Behind the tower runs a half-hidden river, the Lesina, a tributary of the Brembo, and a small hill at the base recalls that the village sits on the heights towards the Valle San Martino; the ears of wheat and the bunch of grapes say the rest.

Of the three settlements it is Arzenate that keeps the oldest thing: the church of San Pietro ad Vincula, which according to some studies goes back to a period between the eighth and the tenth century and has held on to its very distinctive Romanesque style despite the medieval rebuildings. Palazzo Passi-Ghidini, of the fifteenth century and enlarged in the seventeenth, was instead built over the still clearly visible remains of a Roman camp. And before the fiefs there was a Lombard curtis, the curtis lemennis, which the bishop of Bergamo later entrusted to the monks of the Astino valley, as documents of 1234 record.