Bione

Bione was the seat of one of the oldest pievi of the Val Sabbia, and its history is that of a mother church which went on losing daughters. The pieve covered the whole Conca d'Oro, and one after another the parishes made themselves independent: Agnosine before 1037, Odolo in 1559, Gazzane di Preseglie in 1671, and San Faustino only in 1926. How old that pieve is was seen in 1955, when the digging for the elementary school yielded fragments of decorated slabs which, according to Panazza and Tagliaferri, go back to the eighth or ninth century and would be all that is left of the pluteus of the old church. Of that church only the bell tower was still standing: in 1952 it was rebuilt and raised to match the size of the new parish church.

In 775, according to the royal donation to the monastery of San Salvatore drawn up at Pavia, the Lombard king Desiderius entrusted the watch over the Brescian valleys to a gastaldo named Abono, probably a man of Bione. In the thirteenth century the silver mines of Visello were part of this territory, later passing to Preseglie. In 1427 the whole Val Sabbia entered the dominions of Venice and received privileges from it, among them exemption from the duty of lodging horses and soldiers; and in 1440 doge Foscari granted in fief Abbione — as the village was then called — together with Odolo, Agnosine and Preseglie, to Galvano da Nozza, who had fought for Venice and had lost his son Aldreghino in battle. On the name there is no agreement: some derive it from the dialect word for the amaranth colour, others from the Greek bios, life.