Morengo

Morengo most probably means "Mauro's estate". The old name, Mauringo, appears for the first time in 963 in a diploma of Otto I granting the bishop of Bergamo, Olderico, lands that had belonged to king Berengar and his wife Villa; the ending -ing, Lombard, marks precisely someone's holding, and that Mauro could be the owner of the Roman villa whose remains surface in Campo San Martino, among fragments of painted plaster, mosaic tesserae and traces of a nymphaeum. Long before that, the transhumance routes passed through here: the flocks came up from Crema by way of Mozzanica and Bariano to the hills of Bergamo, and at Morengo they found the springs, the grass and the ford of the Serio.

That soil still gives back what was entrusted to it. In 1958, ploughing at the place called Campo Boschetto, coins came to light buried under a layer of ash: the remains of the wooden box that held them. Sixty-four were recovered, and another fifty-six came out of the same field in 1979, after patient sieving of the earth; they date from the second century AD and are kept in the Archaeological Museum of Bergamo. Someone, in short, was putting savings aside here and never came back for them. In 1047 the emperor Henry III confirmed and restored to the bishop of Cremona the tithe of Morengo, which had been taken from him.