Castro

This village was born in order not to pay a toll. It was wanted by the bishop-count of Bergamo as a fortified port for trade between the plain and the Bergamo valleys, great producers of iron: unloading here meant not passing through the territory of Lovere, which was in the hands of the bishop-count of Brescia, and therefore not paying his duties. Behind the built-up area the «via corna» still exists, the road the merchants' carts took to climb towards the valleys. The name says the rest: it comes from the Latin castrum, fortification. On the height that rises over the coast stood the fortress, destroyed in 1380 during the clashes between Guelphs and Ghibellines — it was the Ghibellines who attacked and pulled it down — and since then those ruins have stayed unused.

Having lost its role as a commercial port to the advantage of Lovere, the village changed its trade: first fishing, then, under the Serenissima, the forges and the hammers for working iron. It is told that the quality was such that here they made the cannons the Venetians mounted on their ships; and there was a scythe forge so renowned that it had to import workers even from beyond the Alps. Ironworking is still here, and it is the reason why the field of the coat of arms, granted on 26 June 2008, is red, with the tower of the fortified port looking over the waters of Lake Iseo. Stone counts too: at Grè, along the lakeside road, a quarry has been working for more than a hundred years the Ceppo di Grè, used all over Italy and exported abroad. And the old lake road is worth the journey: the sedimentary rock piles up in overlapping slabs — that stretch they call the Orrido — and falls sheer into the water, forming the little coves that here are called bögn.