Berlingo

The name Berlingo has two explanations, and the finest is also the least likely: according to Guerrini's hypothesis it would be the dialect corruption of "labirinto", labyrinth, from the name given to the villa of the counts Calini because of the maze-shaped garden it held — and that garden is still there, behind the former Gorno-Tempini palace. The other hypothesis, Gnaga's, derives it from berlengum, a field set aside for a use whose meaning has been lost; the third, the most cautious, sticks to the suffix -ingo, Gothic or Lombard. The coat of arms is no help in choosing but tells something else: two towers, for Berlingo and for Berlinghetto, and a star in the middle joining them. It appears on a municipal seal of 1808, and twice the municipality was officially called "Berlingo con Berlinghetto".

In 1630 the plague halved the inhabitants, and for generations people here lived off small plots rented from the Calini and the Martinengo. Deliverance came from bees: in 1869, in the park of the Metelli-Calini villa, Giuseppe Metelli opened an apiary run on scientific lines. His son Arsace worked there, the man who brought farm machinery and chemical fertiliser to the district, and then the brothers Federico and Giovanni, who between 1883 and 1897 signed thirty-five articles in the monthly "L'Apicoltore". The queen bees of Berlingo were asked for as far away as Russia. Meanwhile, on the outer wall of a small early medieval church, a danse macabre remains painted: they call it the church of the dead.