Cene

The Ratta quarry was a disused extraction site north of the village, and in 1965 a landslip laid its rock bare. A local researcher, Antonio Canova, found fragments of fossil fish there; with the help of the Bergamo museum the area was protected and the excavations yielded thousands of fossils in almost perfect condition. The most important is Eudimorphodon ranzii, a flying reptile that forced the appearance of that kind of animal to be pushed back by some twenty million years. Today it is in the Natural Sciences Museum of Bergamo, and it comes from a provincial quarry nobody was looking at any more.

Four thousand two hundred and twenty-nine inhabitants in the province of Bergamo, on the left side of the Val Seriana, between the three hundred and sixty metres of the valley floor and the barely eight hundred of the slopes of Monte Altino. The name is said to derive from the Latin caenum, mud, and the place called the Campi matti, the mad fields, along the Serio bears it out: land too often flooded for anything to be grown on it. Some sixteenth-century historians preferred a nobler version and traced the village back to Cidnus, mythical first inhabitant of Bergamo, from whom the Cenomani were supposed to descend.