Gorno

There is a rock named after the village: the Gorno Formation, which outcrops along the Orobic pre-Alpine belt and was laid down between 230 and 181 million years ago, in the Triassic. Inside it is the Bergamasque metalliferous limestone, which carries sphalerite, calamine and galena, and that is why the val del Riso was for centuries a valley of mines. The same rocks are full of fossils: small bivalve shells above all, but also the odd ammonite. The muddy, shallow floor of an ancient sea has become the mountain above the village.

On the name, on the other hand, no agreement has ever been reached. Some derive it from the Roman personal name Gornus, others from the Etruscan Goreno; don Ceruti, in 1858, traced it to a Hebrew word meaning threshing floor, because there were many of those here for beating the wheat. And then there is professor Stefano Dotti's theory, which ties it to peoples who came from far away in search of mineral deposits: in Serbian, Croatian and Bulgarian «gorno» means upper, and in Croatian gora is the mountain — and the village's first settlement, the contrada of San Giovanni, stands precisely above Monte Göra. In the lands those peoples are said to have set out from there are still Gorno-Altaysk and the Gorno-Badakhshan.