Verdellino

The name probably comes from the Latin virides, the green of the wide meadows that covered this part of the Bergamo plain; more recent studies prefer a prefix vir- of likely Celtic stock, taking the first settlement back to the Cenomani Gauls. The village appears in the records in 1010 as Verdello Minore, and in a letter of the late sixteenth century as Verdel Piccolo: a few dozen families, all farmers and all poor. On 22 March 1358 the mercenary captain Konrad von Landau burned it down together with Comun Nuovo and Verdello.

The sixteenth-century sanctuary of the Beata Vergine dell'Olmo once stood in open country; today it is shut inside Zingonia, the industrial town planned after the war for fifty thousand people and left half built across several municipalities. The elm that gave it its name broke after years of disease, and its base can still be seen. The arms hold both stories: a green tree on a sky field and, on the grassy ground, a golden cogwheel for the factories of Zingonia.