Urgnano

Three explanations compete for the name: the most accepted traces it to a Roman landowner, one Aurinus, plus the suffix -anus; another points to the Huns; popular tradition prefers the urn. From Roman times there remain two funerary stones and the Cremasca and Francesca roads: the Franks repaired the Francesca in the ninth century to carry the body of emperor Louis II from Brescia to Milan. The first document naming the rural comune is from 985.

In the fourteenth century the Visconti replaced the old fort with the square, four-towered castle that still dominates the town; Venice later granted it in fief to Bartolomeo Colleoni. The captain also had the sanctuary of Basella enlarged, built in that hamlet after the apparitions of the Virgin of 8 and 17 April 1356, and buried his daughter Medea there. The parish church of Santi Nazario e Celso holds the eighteenth-century organ by Giuseppe Serassi, the largest built in Bergamo; the 54-metre bell tower carries the name of the architect Luigi Cagnola. Documents of 1622 list fields of maize: the town was among the first to grow it.