Sedrina

For centuries Sedrina was a village closed off by a narrowing of the valley: towards the south, in the direction of Bergamo, one passed only by narrow paths, and to reach Clanezzo or Brembilla the Brembo had to be crossed on hanging bridges. It was Venice that broke the isolation, with the via Priula, finished in 1593: to get past the rocks at the Botta hamlet the engineers hung the road on the wall with a series of arches fixed by chains, the "keys of the Botta". Two hundred metres in all, protected from the precipice by a wall a few centimetres high; they cost the lives of several workmen, and today they no longer exist, because once Venetian rule ended nobody maintained them. Of the bridges of Sedrina, instead, it is still told that the gentleman bandit Pacì Paciana threw himself off the wooden one to escape the gendarmes.

The traffic that in the twentieth century climbed the whole Brembana valley went straight through the middle of the village and made it nearly unlivable; the problem was solved in the early nineteen-eighties with a viaduct about a hundred metres high, which carries the cars clear of the houses without having wiped out the old bridges, still in use. In the parish church of San Giacomo, built in the fifteenth century by the Brembana architect Mauro Codussi, there is an altarpiece by Lorenzo Lotto with the Madonna and saints. And here, on 29 September 1942, the son of a lorry driver and a postwoman, Felice Gimondi was born, one of the eight riders able to win all three grand tours.