Cavernago

Cavernago has two castles, and both belonged to the Colleoni. The one at Cavernago was the seigneurial residence of the condottiero's descendants, later passing to the Martinengo-Colleoni branch; the one at Malpaga, today a hamlet, was the place where Bartolomeo Colleoni chose to retire after a lifetime of battles, and it was no quiet retirement: with its double moat it was a small court of feasts, banquets and tournaments, where about six hundred people lived between knights and servants, and through which passed the political and artistic figures of the time. The water too carries his signature: the Borgogna watercourse, which he had dug himself, gives rise to the Martinenga, the Borgogna di Cavernago and a dense network of lesser canals.

The municipal coat of arms is that of the Martinengo Colleoni: the red eagle of the Martinengo, settled in the castle around the year one thousand, quartered with the symbols of Bartolomeo, who had added the eight golden fleurs-de-lis granted him by René of Anjou in 1467. The rest of the village is humbler and harder: the plague of 1630 halved the inhabitants, and for two centuries Cavernago was a place of wheat and maize, with farmsteads at the edge of the built-up area, some still in use and some not. In the oratory of the Dead is kept the earliest known work of the painter Vincenzo Angelo Orelli, a Trinity with the Virgin and the souls in purgatory, painted in 1772.