Oneta

The coat of arms, granted by royal decree in 1933, is divided in two. On one side there is the profile of Monte Alben, which rises above two thousand metres, with a cross on its top and at its foot the village with its pastures; on the other a lit miner's lamp, standing for the work in the zinc and lead mines. That work is older than one would imagine: the mines of the valley of the Riso were already intensively exploited by the Etruscans, and the extractive activity of the area is attested by the Roman historians Strabo and Pliny the Elder, who speaks of it in the Naturalis Historia. The mines made these mountains prosper for centuries, and then closed in the middle of the twentieth century, leaving the whole valley in an economic crisis that lasted decades. On the shield, however, the lamp has stayed lit. The name of the village, on the other hand, comes from the Latin alnetum, the alder wood, the tree the territory was full of.

Twice, here, the people chose who should govern them. The first was in 1427, when a delegation of inhabitants, together with representatives of the neighbouring villages, went all the way to Venice to ask to pass under the jurisdiction of the Serenissima and have done with the Visconti's vexations: from there began a long period of prosperity, closed only by the arrival of the French. The second was at the beginning of the nineteenth century, when Oneta was merged with Gorno: the protests of the inhabitants were so strong that the new administrative entity did not reach ten years of life. Before all this, the first document naming the village is of 774, and it is an edict of Charlemagne in person, ceding much of the upper Val Seriana to the abbey of the monks of Tours; in 1026 the monks exchanged those lands with the bishop of Bergamo. On the slopes of the Alben stands the sanctuary of the Madonna del Frassino, of 1502.