Lallio

The name is said to come from the Latin alea, the gaming die: tradition holds that Roman legionaries spent the winter here amusing themselves, and that the place took its name from the pastime. That is why the municipal arms carry a chequerboard — a design not invented in the town hall but found in the parish archives, on the frontispiece of an inventory of 1707, and then officially adopted in 1964. The first document naming Lallio is from the eleventh of September 875, the will of an inhabitant of Stezzano who owned land here.

Four thousand one hundred and twenty-four inhabitants in the province of Bergamo, on little more than two square kilometres: it is among the smallest municipalities in Italy, the twelfth smallest in its own province. And it is also, for the same reason, the first commune in the Bergamo province and the third in Lombardy for land consumption, with over 66 per cent of its territory now built over with warehouses and houses. The fifteenth-century church of San Bernardino is a national monument and holds frescoes by Gerolamo Colleoni and by Cristoforo Baschenis the elder.