Ponte San Pietro

The name is traced back to a notarial deed of 881 that mentions a Basilica Sancti Petri sita ad pontem Brembi: a small bridge over the Brembo and the church beside it. The spot was hard to cross by boat, and for two hundred years people stayed on one bank or the other, S. Petri de za and S. Petri de là, before the settlement took hold on both. The Brembo still splits the town in two; for anyone coming from Bergamo this is the first comune of the Isola bergamasca.

At the end of the thirteenth century Manfredino De' Melioratis raised a castle in the old centre; the Venetians pulled it down in the early eighteenth century, and the salvaged stone went into the country church people still call the old church, which kept writings and burials from the plague years. The arms join the two: a humpback bridge of two arches over the river, carrying a ruined tower at its centre. At Sottoriva, in Locate, a comune of its own until the twentieth century, Villa Mapelli Mozzi took its present shape before the Villa Reale in Monza was designed.