Palazzago

Palazzago's coat of arms holds war and peace together: the sword and the flames recall the Guelph and Ghibelline fighting that tore the village apart, the olive branch recalls that its deputies took part in the peace of Pontesecco between the two factions. It was the Visconti, once they had won, who ordered the destruction of every building put up for fighting. Quiet came only in the fifteenth century with the Republic of Venice; and four hundred years later, in 1849, Carlo Agazzi and Federico Alborghetti kept the Austrian imperial troops occupied for more than two months with the barest of means, in what is remembered here as the guerrilla of Palazzago.

Four thousand two hundred and ninety-three inhabitants in the province of Bergamo, in the Valle Imagna, on the Borgogna torrent. The bell tower of the collegiate church of San Giovanni Battista, nearly fifty metres high, is a fourteenth-century defensive tower converted: inside are eight bells cast in 1902 by Giorgio Pruneri of Grosio, and the two largest were recast in 1954 because the old ones had been requisitioned for the war in 1943. The church holds an Assumption altarpiece by Giovan Battista Moroni and a chapel with Satan painted on its ceiling.