Parre

In 1883, digging a field in the Castello district, the farmers of Parre found a buried hoard full of bronzes of the fifth century before Christ: ornaments, tools, fragments, casting slag. Not knowing what they had in their hands, they sold a thousand kilograms of it to a foundry, and that material is lost for ever. Only a small part was saved because the archaeologist Gaetano Mantovani, warned in time, hurried to buy what was left and gave it to the archaeological museum of Bergamo, where it still is.

That terrace above the point where the Dossana valley joins the Serio was the oppidum of the Orobi, and the position explains everything: from there one controlled the crossroads between the plain, the upper Val Seriana, the Valtellina, the Val di Scalve and the Val Camonica. Monte Trevasco, which rises above the village, was rich in minerals — bronze, lead, iron, argentiferous galena — and people came back to it for millennia. In 1983, a hundred years later, new excavations were made. Two thousand eight hundred and seven inhabitants in the province of Bergamo.