This village carries the name of its own danger twice over. In the old days it was called Oltre il dragone, from the Bergamasque dargùn, «ruinous torrent», or drag, «landslide»; and Gandellino, the name that first appears in a notarial deed of 1396, comes in all likelihood from gand, which also means landslide. It is an accurate description: a landslide in the fifteenth century destroyed the forges that stood along the Sedornia stream, and the one of 1834 wiped out even their traces, leaving only the notaries' deeds to say they had been there. The first document naming the place is from 774, when Charlemagne gave the whole upper Val Seriana to the monastery of Saint Martin of Tours: Saint Martin has remained the patron.
Their autonomy, on the other hand, they earned by demolishing a castle. In June 1266 the men of Gandellino, together with those of Gromo and Valgoglio and at their own expense, took part in the siege of the castle of Covo: working as sappers they brought down one wing of it and opened the way for the soldiers. The following year Bergamo granted them autonomy, and the document, called the Instrumento del privilegio, can still be consulted in the museum at Gromo. Up the Val Sedornia, at the place called Spiaz de Martisola, there is a moss-covered erratic boulder with cup-marks and engravings and a stair cut into one side: an altar-stone, used according to the studies between the third and the first millennium BC.
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📅 Every year, on 11 November
On 11 November Gandellino celebrates its patron Saint Martin; the town's most heartfelt feast, however, is that of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, moved to 15 August by emigrants.
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.
Outside Gandellino, but an easy day trip away.
