Villa d'Adda

On the eleventh of July 1193 the commune of Bergamo declared Villa d'Adda a free borough: it put the village on the same legal footing as the city and freed it from taxes and tithes. Those privileges are still on the coat of arms, in the yellow and red that are Bergamo's colours; beside them are the river and seven towers, recalling the village's seven castles. Ghibelline among Guelph neighbours, Villa d'Adda had filled itself with fortifications: the chronicles speak of seven castles and thirty-three towers, and of repeated sackings and burnings between the end of the fourteenth century and the beginning of the fifteenth.

In November 1629 the plague arrived. The village shut itself in: it barred the ways with gates and let nobody enter. The dead were seventy-three out of eight hundred and twenty inhabitants, a far lower proportion than in the villages round about, and in thanksgiving the oratory of the Dead of the Rite and other small devotional buildings were raised. Nineteen years earlier, in August 1610, the remains of Saint Charles Borromeo had passed through here on their way to Arona.