Osio Sotto

The name comes from the gens Otia, the patrician family that counted for much when the Romans laid their land grid over this stretch of plain between Milan and Bergamo; in Bergamo the last leg of the road between them was called via Osio. Ninth and tenth century deeds record the village as Osio subteriore. In the Middle Ages it drew the ambitions of the leading families and had to give itself a castle where people could shelter: raids were frequent partly because saltpetre was dug here, and saltpetre made gunpowder.

The arms remember that season: a silver griffin on red, set against two crossed swords; the composition stands for the wars between Guelphs and Ghibellines and for the sackings and fires brought by mercenary bands. When the village passed to the Republic of Venice in 1427, irrigation canals followed; yet in 1596 Giovanni da Lezze still described a poor place, with a castle ringed by walls and a moat, a few churches by then in ruins and only three peasant families, each with an income of about a hundred ducats. The villagers pulled that castle down in the seventeenth century once it had no master; the comune did away with the moat before the century was out.