Angolo Terme

Angolo appears, under the name Anghol, on the map of the Valle Camonica drawn by Leonardo da Vinci in 1509 and kept at Windsor. It was no ordinary village: iron had been dug here since about the fourth century BC, and in 1335 Luchino Visconti granted the Federici the privilege of extracting it. The mountain gave it another kind of fame as well: the Angolo limestone, a sedimentary formation of the middle Triassic, carries the village's name. It stands on the right bank of the Dezzo torrent, at the mouth of the Val di Scalve, and its coat of arms is a landscape: snowy peaks, firs, deer and a bridge over the Dezzo.

In 1923 the failure of the Gleno dam, upstream in the Val di Scalve, damaged several houses in Angolo and killed forty-six of its inhabitants. The village had already changed its administrative place more than once — in 1846, finding itself in the province of Bergamo, it asked to return to that of Brescia — and in 1862 the thirteen-kilometre road towards the Val di Scalve was finished, bypassing the Giogo pass, designed by the engineer Paolo Fiorini of Darfo. The present name is recent: until 1963 the municipality was called simply Angolo, then it added Terme to say what it had become, a village of waters, of skiing at Colle Vareno and Monte Pora and of outings to Lake Moro.