Bovegno

The statutes of Bovegno, of 1341, contain the oldest mining law known in Italy: they come before those of the marble quarries of Carrara. And that is not the village's only written record: in 1980 the so-called Mayor gremeza came to light, a manuscript of 1355 with notarial acts and a prayer in old Brescian, considered the oldest written testimony in eastern Lombard. Even geology carries the name of the place: the limestone formation that outcrops here is called the Carniola di Bovegno.

The name comes from the Rhaeto-Celtic Vöb-egn, "the ford of the river", and the Vobenates were one of the tribes of the Triumplini; a Roman stone of the first century BC, now in the museum of Brescia, records Staius son of Esdragass, prince and prefect of the cohort of the Triumplini, with his wife Messava. The old settlement lay low down, at the hamlet of Piano, and moved uphill — where the hamlet of Castello is today — around the tenth century, with the last Hungarian raids. Bovegno passed from the Confalonieri to the Pinzoni, and in 1276 freed itself from paying dues. In 1339 it absorbed a neighbouring municipality, Magno, where three families lived. The boundary quarrels with Bienno, Collio, Pezzaze and Irma went on for centuries, and in 1797 the village was the centre of Venetian resistance in the Val Trompia against the French.