Strozza

At the mouth of the Valle Imagna the mountains draw together until they pinch, and then the valley opens out: that narrowing gave the village its name. The settlement was born around the year one thousand, but on the slopes of Monte Albenza the remains of a Roman aqueduct have been found. In the Middle Ages there was more fighting here than elsewhere in the Bergamo country, because the Valle Imagna was Guelph and the neighbouring Valle Brembilla Ghibelline: castles and fortifications went up everywhere, and at Strozza there survive tower-houses and fortified nuclei built between the twelfth and the thirteenth centuries. When Venice arrived, backing the Guelphs, villages like this one were treated favourably.

The finest things, though, are small and hidden. From Clanezzo starts the Chitò path, which follows a disused hydroelectric channel and crosses the Imagna on a bold stone aqueduct-bridge, passing springs that lay down limestone crusts, a rare thing in these parts. In the hamlet of Amagno, beneath the Cà del Maestro, an underground passage leads to a cylindrical vaulted chamber: an ice house that has come down intact from a couple of centuries ago. And at Cà Campo, in the fifteenth-century oratory of San Pantaleone, they venerate San Momà, who is the protector of new mothers left without milk.