Bonate Sotto

Bonate Sotto lies in the Isola bergamasca, on the right bank of the Brembo, crossed by the Lesina and Dordo streams. The name may come from a Roman landowner called Bonus, or from terrae bonae, good farming land, or from the chief of a Cenomani Gaulish tribe, given the ending -ate common in villages around Bergamo. The first written records date from 774 and already tell a lower Bonate from an upper one. Under Venice the Isola was called the triangle of hunger: a report of the time found no trade there and harvests barely enough to live on.

Of the basilica of Santa Giulia, in the settlement of Lesina, named after the stream, three apses and one bay survive: the community that raised it scattered, the building was quarried, and its stone and brick went into the parish bell tower, among the tallest on the Isola. The rest stands in the cemetery as its chapel, and the coat of arms carries the outline of those ruins over a green base. A letter of pope Honorius II from 1129 calls the church of Lesina not yet consecrated, the earliest firm proof it existed: tradition credited queen Theodelinda, dead five centuries before, because of an urn said to hold her daughter, which in fact recalls a Roman girl named Tiziana.