Scanzorosciate

Scanzorosciate is a scattered comune: the town hall stands at Scanzo, but the territory is split among five hamlets — Scanzo, Rosciate, Negrone, Tribulina and Gavarno Vescovado — each with its own parish. Scanzo and Rosciate were a single body until 1659, when they parted, and became one comune again only in 1927; the name has held both together ever since. Rosciate carries the Celtic suffix -ate, village, after ros-, a bunch of grapes: the village of the grape.

The grapes stayed. The hills above the village yield Moscato di Scanzo, a red passito whose production zone lies wholly inside the municipal boundary, on thirty-one hectares of vineyard. The jurist Alberico da Rosciate, born here, left vineyards to his collaborators in his will of 1347, and to one of them an unstated quantity of Bergamasque moscato; Donato Calvi's Effemeridi record that in 1398 the Guelphs seized forty-two cartloads of red moscato from Scanzo. Late in the eighteenth century the architect Giacomo Quarenghi, who had bought a house at Rosciate, sent bottles to tsarina Catherine II and the English dignitaries at her court, who took it for a new kind of sherry.