Santa Brigida

The village bears the name of a Benedictine nun who is the patron saint of Ireland, and it sits on the right-hand side of the Val Averara, a side valley of the upper Val Brembana. The first document that names this area is of 917 and mentions an inhabitant of the zone of Abrara: it is the oldest text there is for the whole of the upper Brembana valley, and the name in it probably meant not the neighbouring comune but the entire valley. People are thought to have begun settling here for good at the time of the barbarian invasions, when those exposed to the raids went looking for remote places; the first are supposed to have come from the Valsassina, around the sixth century, and certain place names are the same on both sides.

From the Middle Ages nails were made here — with iron dug in the mines nearby — and charcoal, and under Venice the trade flourished and the village prospered for a long time. It ended with the Cisalpine Republic and then with the Austrians: the territory was reorganised, all the small comuni were rolled into a single district with its seat at Piazza, and the privileges and exemptions the village had enjoyed were revoked. Then came heavy duties, imposed by the Habsburg government to favour production within its own borders, and the working of iron never recovered: in the end the trade was abandoned almost entirely, in the whole area. Only recently has the economy come back up, with tourism. The sanctuary of the Beata Vergine Addolorata, which is of the eleventh or twelfth century, was consecrated by Carlo Borromeo in 1566 and served as the parish church until the new one was built.