Gandosso

In these parts people used to say they were «as safe as inside the castle of Gandosso». The stronghold had been built when these hills too were caught up in the struggles between Guelphs and Ghibellines, with the Visconti taking reprisals against a territory that sided with Venice, and it soon earned a reputation as an unreachable place: hence the saying. It did not help it much, because at the end of the eighteenth century the French destroyed it, and today there remain only a few stretches of foundation, pieces of walling and a staircase cut into the rock. A little outside the village, in a panoramic position, stands the sanctuary of the Madonna del Castello, which keeps a great many ex-votos, a Via Crucis of the fifteenth century and a painting of the Madonna and Child that many hold to be miraculous.

The real wealth, though, was underground. The hills are full of caves and hollows — the best known are called Dol Mosc, la Luga and la Molera — and it was from the Molera, low down on the border with Credaro, that since Roman times the stone was quarried to make the millstones for grinding grain. For centuries that was a sure source of work, and it lasted until the second half of the twentieth century, when the quarries were abandoned one after another. The parish church of the Annunciation was built in 1679 to a design by Andrea Fantoni and keeps wooden sculptures and marble inlays of the Fantoni school, paintings by Girolamo Castelli and Antonio Balestra and an organ by the Bossi family.