Berzo Demo

On the arms of Berzo Demo there is a buckwheat plant and three cylinders. Buckwheat is the typical crop of this mountain village; the cylinders are graphite electrodes, because when the arms were granted the comune was «the largest, if not the only, producer of graphite in Italy». At Forno d'Allione, where a smelting furnace had already been working since 1808, the graphite electrode factory was founded in 1929; it later passed to Union Carbide and, with the international steel crisis, closed for good in 1994. On the arms those three cylinders have stayed.

The comune is made of three villages stacked up the slope: Demo at the bottom, Berzo in the middle, Monte at the top. Berzo would come from the pre-Latin Bersium, a pen for animals; Demo perhaps from dema, «way», because the old valley road passed through here. At Demo, every five years, they hold the feast of the Madonna Grande: the village dresses itself in fir branches and paper flowers and every family builds its own «grotto», for a vow made in 1880 after escaping a flood. And in the little church of the Dead, until a few years ago, there were wooden legs, feet and hands: anatomical votive offerings made with no art at all by some local carpenter.