Carobbio degli Angeli

The municipal coat of arms, granted in 1986, shows the castle of the Angels with Guelph battlements: the square kind, which in medieval heraldry marked the supporters of the pope. Carobbio, however, was always on the Ghibelline side, and its merlons ought to have been swallow-tailed. The mistake is now official, printed on the town's documents, and it has the merit of reminding us that after so many centuries the factions that split the Bergamo countryside have become a decorative detail nobody checks any more.

Four thousand five hundred and forty-nine inhabitants in the province of Bergamo, at the mouth of the Valcalepio. The name may come from the Latin car-obitus, a depot of funeral carts said to have stood here on the Roman road between Bergamo and Brescia — stretches of it, laid entirely in cobbles, have been found in the hamlet of Cicola — or more simply from quadrivium, the crossroads. The fourteenth-century castle of the Lanzi family of Trescore, once the wars were over, was left by will to the Carmelites, who enlarged it with a small church and turned it into a friary. The municipality in its present form dates from 1928, when Carobbio was joined to Santo Stefano del Monte degli Angeli.