Piazzatorre

Everyone takes it for granted that the name means «square of the tower», but the documents say otherwise. If there were a tower, in Latin one would read turris, turrim, turri; instead the old charters always show another word, torro or tora: Plazatorro in 1185, Plazatora in 1212, in teritorio de Plazathoro in 1330, commune de Plazatora in the Statute of Bergamo of 1331, in plaza de Plazatora in 1342, Plazatoro in 1473, and so on through the whole sixteenth century, pastoral visits included (in 1536 bishop Lippomano writes Plazatorii, Plazatorio, Plazatorium). The form Plateaturris begins to circulate only in the religious documents of the seventeenth century, and from there it passed into Italian. The true root is torus or taurus, the height, the raised ground, joined to platea: an open space up high, which is exactly what the village stands on, in the upper Val Brembana, between eight hundred and fifty and eleven hundred metres.

The first holidaymakers, Milanese families of good standing, arrived at the beginning of the twentieth century, and until the forties Piazzatorre was a summer place only. Then the Torcole lifts were built and winter came too: today the village lives on both seasons, and it hosts the pre-season training camps of sports teams, which find here the air and the quiet. Behind it are the real mountains: monte Secco Brembano, which passes two thousand two hundred metres, and pizzo Badile Brembano, a little above two thousand. You climb from Piazzo, with more than twelve hundred metres of ascent and about four hours of walking; on the way, the guides warn, no water is to be found.