The municipal coat of arms is a pope's, with two changes. In 1960 the council asked for and obtained permission to adopt an emblem recalling that of John XXIII: compared with the papal arms it lacks the chief of Saint Mark — which belonged to him as patriarch of Venice — and one of the lilies, replaced by an Italian-style mount of three peaks. The mount is the Canto, the one that gives the village its name: originally it was called Sotto il monte dei frati, under the friars' mountain, for the Benedictines who had settled at Fontanella, and in time the friars fell out of the phrase.
Four thousand two hundred and ninety-one inhabitants in the province of Bergamo, at the northern end of the Isola bergamasca. In the Brusicco quarter, in a farmhouse where thirty people of the same family lived, Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli was born on the twenty-fifth of November 1881; on the twenty-eighth of October 1958 he was elected pope, and on his death, on the third of June 1963, the village added his name to its own. The abbey of Sant'Egidio in Fontanella, built in Romanesque style in the tenth century, is one of the best preserved medieval buildings in the province; the tower of San Giovanni on the hill was never used for defence and had already become a bell tower in the fourteenth century.
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📅 Every year, on 11 October
On 11 October Sotto il Monte Giovanni XXIII celebrates its patron Saint John the Baptist; the town added to its own name that of Pope John XXIII, born Angelo Roncalli there in 1881.
Straight-line distances from the town centre. Tap a point to open its page.
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
Outside Sotto il Monte Giovanni XXIII, but an easy day trip away.
