Costa Serina

Costa Serina has 973 inhabitants in the Val Serina, a side valley of the Val Brembana. The first document is from 1186; in the Middle Ages the village was called Costa di Sambusita and was one of the first in the area to give itself a communal statute, taking its present name only in the fifteenth century. The via Mercatorum passed through here, the merchants' road between the Val Seriana and the Val Brembana, and one hamlet still carries the memory in its name: it is called Trafficanti, from the traffic of goods.

In the parish church of San Lorenzo a recent restoration brought back to light a fifteenth-century fresco of Saints Martha and Lucy, which outlived the church it had been painted for: it is the work of Maffiolo da Cazzano or of his workshop. During the twenty years of fascism Costa Serina was merged with Bracca and Rigosa and for a while was called Bracca di Costa Serina; the three villages separated definitively only in 1961. Above the houses, near the sanctuary of the Madonna della Neve, stands the house where fra Cecilio Cortinovis was born.