Bedulita

The village was called San Michil, after the archangel the Lombards venerated, who is still its patron; then it took the name of the birch woods that surrounded it, and the first written trace of that name is of 1030, when a meadow called Bedolito was sold. The coat of arms carries both names at once: a half-flight of wings for the archangel and for the old denomination Santo Michel de Badulita, and a birch as canting arms for the new one. The wavy bands are the Imagna torrent, which divides Bedulita from Berbenno, and the abundance of water in its territory.

In the Middle Ages the Imagna valley was Guelph and the neighbouring Brembilla valley Ghibelline, and here the fighting was harder than elsewhere in the Bergamo country: the bell tower of the church still stands on the base of a defensive tower of the twelfth or thirteenth century, and revolts broke out at Bedulita in 1363, in 1376 and in 1407, each of them put down by arms. In 1756, when the theories of the Enlightenment were calling into question the central place of the Church and had found followers here as well, the whole community gathered at the Ponte Giurino and swore fidelity to the Roman church. The parish church, rebuilt in 1859, keeps frescoes of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and an organ by Perolini, a pupil of Serassi.