Bossico

Bossico has 969 inhabitants on a dolomite plateau overlooking the Val Borlezza, the upper Val Cavallina and Lake Iseo. It is karst land, full of sinkholes, moraine saddles and erratic boulders, and perhaps the name comes from just that: for the scholar Alessandro Sina the dialect word bösec means a hollow set on a height. The place name appears for the first time in 1562, written Busecco. On the plateau four rocks survive with prehistoric cup marks.

In the later nineteenth century, for the view over the lake, Bossico became a summer resort for the entrepreneurial bourgeoisie of the Sebino, who built a series of villas there and christened them with the names of the seven hills of Rome — Aventine, Capitoline, Caelian, Esquiline, Palatine, Quirinal, Viminal — and then Janiculum, Pincian, Caprera: names from Rome as capital and from Garibaldi, political declarations put on houses. In the parish church, the triduum apparatus of 1783 makes the angels rise and fall on a winch. After centuries in the diocese of Brescia, since 2024 the parish has passed to that of Bergamo.