Lenna

The coat of arms granted to Lenna in 2004 carries a pair of open compasses, and those compasses are there for a man: Mauro Codussi, the architect who built in Venice, was born in this village. The three gold stars stand for the Marian devotion of the inhabitants and for the three old boroughs the village was made of — Cantone, Coltura and Lenna — and the bridge is the stone one they call the bridge of the goats, a single arch thrown over the Brembo in the sixteen hundreds and repaired after the flood of 1987. Lenna stands where the two branches of the Brembo meet, and has always been called the gate of the upper Val Brembana.

The Romans were here from the second century before Christ and worked the iron of these mountains, linking the valley by road to the mining district of the Val Seriana. Under Venice the trade grew: the Republic made Lenna an ironworking centre, using the water for power, and out of here went nails, swords and working tools that reached as far as Germany. Then came other industries: a factory founded by Giuseppe Oberti, which from 1876 to 1964 made cement floor tiles and mosaic tiles sold all over Italy, and which came to employ about a hundred people once the valley railway was opened; since 2007 part of that line's bed has become a cycle path along the river. And for nearly thirty years Lenna did not exist as a comune: in 1927 the fascist government merged it with Valnegra, Piazza Brembana and Moio de' Calvi into a single comune called San Martino de' Calvi, and the four separated again only in 1956.