Borgo di Terzo

The village gave its name to a family, not the other way round: from this small town in the Val Cavallina came the Terzi, nobles of Bergamo. In the Middle Ages it was entirely walled, with a castle looking down over the valley, and it must have counted for something if it was Frederick Barbarossa in person who razed it to the ground, in 1168. They rebuilt it a few years later, but then let it go: time and the houses built over it have wiped out every trace. From that period the Torrazzo remains, a thirteenth-century palace in the upper part of the village.

In the conventual church, which cannot be visited, there is a seventeenth-century cloister that belonged to the convent of San Michele, suppressed in 1797; and in the middle of the cloister stands a well with four white stone columns and Renaissance capitals, declared a national monument. In the parish church of the Assunta, founded in the thirteenth century and rebuilt four centuries later, there are works by Pietro Marone and Gian Paolo Cavagna. At the beginning of the twentieth century the municipality was joined with Vigano San Martino, Berzo San Fermo and Grone into a single body called Borgounito: it lasted until 1948, and then each went its own way again.