Cazzano Sant'Andrea

Looked at on the map, the territory of Cazzano is a triangle with a tail: a long, very narrow strip of land, between 35 and 80 metres wide, which starts at the south-western corner, cuts crosswise through the Val Gandino and climbs the lower slopes of Monte Beio until it reaches the territory of Cene. It serves no practical purpose, and it was probably added in the Middle Ages for a precise reason: to create a buffer zone between Casnigo and Leffe, that is to keep apart two villages that were quarrelling. Cazzano's boundaries, for that matter, follow neither rivers nor mountains: they are decisions.

The village appears for the first time in a document of 973, as the Borgo di Sant'Andrea, when the valley had been assigned to the monks of Tours; in 1041 the bishop of Bergamo formally became its feudal lord. The Lombards, before that, had stayed a long while: their law remained in effect in the people's customs until the end of the fifteenth century, and the name of the valle del Gaggio comes from the late Latin gagium, the enclosed wood. Underfoot, instead, lies the legacy of a lake: in the Pleistocene the Val Gandino was filled by the lake of Leffe, which on vanishing left clay, carbonates and lignite — materials the local people quarried for centuries to make a living.