The name is the costa, the flank of the mountain. The first inhabitant whose name we know appears in a document of 1250 — «ventura qui dicitur agnellus de la costa» — as a witness to an order of the judge of Bergamo commanding the people of the Valle Imagna to stop seizing the goods of certain men from up here; four years later he turns up again, and by then he was living in Bergamo. Before the thirteen hundreds the village was probably only a summer pasture: it faces north-east and the winter here is hard, so much so that they call Costa the nevera, the snow store of the Valle Imagna.
When in 1428 the Bergamo lands passed to Venice, the village found itself on the line between the Republic and the duchy of Milan. One word has kept the memory of it: in the dialect of Costa an outsider is called bir, sbirro, and it comes in all likelihood from the customs men Venice sent to patrol the border. A bishop's report of the Counter-Reformation complains of the state of the parish church and blames the poverty of the village; a common grave found here is that of the plague of 1630, the plague of Manzoni. Until 1864 the comune was called simply Costa. And from the pass of the Pertüs, above the village, you can see the whole of the Brianza and, on good days, Milan: there are still people who remember seeing at night, during the war, the fires the bombing raids lit in the city.
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📅 Every year, on 2 July; Saint Roch on 16 August
On 2 July Costa Valle Imagna, a municipality of 620 inhabitants in the province of Bergamo, celebrates its patroness Saint Mary of the Visitation; on 16 August comes the feast of Saint Roch.
Straight-line distances from the town centre. Tap a point to open its page.
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
