Isso

The entry that tells this village's story begins by admitting it has almost nothing to say: the information is very scarce, the settlements have always been few, and this never allowed it to play any leading role. Nor does the ground below help, because nothing has ever been found on this territory that would let anyone date the birth of the place, though military garrisons are presumed to have stood here: we are in the low Bergamo plain, on the border with the Cremona country, near a crossroads that linked the far ends of the Po valley. In the Middle Ages the fief was granted to the diocese of Cremona, which then had to defend it from the designs of Milan; those were the years of the wars between Guelphs and Ghibellines, and Isso too gave itself a castle. There remain a piece of its wall, the moat that ringed it, and the battlements, which are the kind typical of the Ghibelline faction: centuries on, the merlons still say which side the village was on. It did not help much, since the Cremonese bishop lost control of the territory and Isso ended up with the Visconti.

Two things, though, this place has. The first is that its parish church is not a parish church: the real one is at Barbata, so the village church is the oratory of Sant'Andrea, which in the seventeenth century was the private chapel of palazzo Zucoli. The second happened in 2010, and has the flavour of a well-made coincidence: while digging on private land to install a photovoltaic plant, the remains of an old building came to light. The archaeological excavation established that it was a church, with some burials attached, and a document of 1390 names in the village a church dedicated to Saint James. For the rest there are the farmsteads scattered in the open country — Secchi, Casella, Cremonesi, Farabona — which still keep the signs of how life was lived.