Ornica

Ornica lies at the foot of the Pizzo dei Tre Signori, in a side valley of the upper Brembana, and the trees gave it its name: the manna ash, in Latin fraxinus ornus, which once covered these slopes. For centuries the village was not a comune of its own but part of the great comune of the Averara valley, and it lived on iron: the ore came from the Scalve valley and the Seriana, and here it was beaten into nails with hammers driven by the water of the torrents.

Independence came in 1647, and it came at the worst moment: those were the plague years, which in this village brought the inhabitants down from 176 to little more than forty. From the age of iron there remains a sanctuary with two names. It was called Blessed Virgin of the Furnace Meadow, because a smelting furnace stood beside it; when the furnace stopped working it took the name Madonna of the Ash Tree, from the tree to which — so the legend goes — bandits had tied the traveller who, calling on the Virgin, found himself free and in gratitude had the first chapel built. Today Ornica houses the first scattered hotel in Lombardy, its rooms spread among the old houses and run by a cooperative of local women.