Vigolo

Vigolo stands on a terrace at about six hundred metres, above the western shore of Lake Iseo. It is very old — small Roman clusters have been identified where the contrade of Bessana, Parmerano, Pressana and Trussano now are — but the name appears in writing only in 1202, and certain documents of 1331 record it as a comune of its own. Its boundaries have hardly moved since: acts of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries describe a comune, under the feudal authority of the Calepio counts, made up of the same contrade that make it up now. Of the tower and the castle the chronicles speak of, the first has ended up swallowed by later building and of the second nothing is left.

The Calepio imposed taxes and duties that were often too heavy, and the resentment grew until the inhabitants did something unusual: they asked to be annexed to the Republic of Venice, and in 1428 the doge agreed. In the following century, though, the quarrel was with the neighbours. Vigolo and Tavernola were a single parish, and the people of Tavernola wanted to split it in two; here they would not agree, and the dispute was fought with stamped paper and notarial acts, degenerating now and then into the usual parochial clashes. In the parish church, built in the seventeen hundreds in place of an earlier one, there are works by Antonio Cifrondi and a fine black marble altar; the bells in the tower were cast in 1953.