Brumano

The name comes from the Latin bruma, the cold, and that is no accident: the village lies in the shadow of the Resegone, at the head of the Valle Imagna, and gets little sun. Everything else follows from that. With such an exposure not much could ever be grown, and so Brumano stayed very small, one of the least populated comuni in the Bergamo area, its people living off what the woods and the pastures gave: shepherds, stock breeders, woodcutters and charcoal burners. Some read the name another way, but what comes out of it is the same: small village.

For centuries it was a border anomaly. While the whole Bergamo area lay under Venice, Brumano belonged to the Duchy of Milan, the only village in the entire valley, and at the Passata pass there still stands a boundary stone of 1791 marking where the Milanese possessions began. Its ties, too, pointed elsewhere: it depended on Lecco from the time of the Franks, and passed to the province of Bergamo only in 1816, by Austrian decision. The religious tie with Lecco, however, lasted two centuries longer: it ended in 2006.