Caprino Bergamasco

The boarding college of Celana was born in 1579 at the wish of Charles Borromeo, who that same year obtained the bull of foundation from Gregory XIII. For centuries it was a boys-only institute — girls were admitted only in the nineteen-nineties — and in the nineteenth century it came to have a thousand students. Angelo Roncalli passed through it, who would become Pope John XXIII, and Francesco Nullo, and later two footballers, Giuseppe Meazza and Sandro Mazzola. In 1965 Ermanno Olmi shot some scenes there for a film about John XXIII. Then the debts: in 2014 the college closed, and since 2016 its classrooms have served as the set of a television programme.

There is another peculiarity, and it concerns the mass. The churches of Caprino and of Sant'Antonio, although on Bergamo soil, depended on the diocese of Milan until 1788; since then they have belonged to the diocese of Bergamo, but the vicariate of Calolzio-Caprino has gone on following the Ambrosian rite and not the Roman one. In the parish church of Celana there is an Assumption by Lorenzo Lotto. Three thousand one hundred and twenty-seven inhabitants.