Braone

The coat of arms of this Valcamonica village, granted in 1984, works like an inventory. The golden bezants recall the find of 1956, when inside an early-medieval tomb nine gold coins of the fifth and sixth centuries came to light, bearing the Eastern Roman emperors: this is the so-called treasure of Braone, today in the national museum of the Valcamonica, and its most recent piece dates to Anastasius, around 518. The stone portals allude to the many closed courtyards of the village's old dwellings. The torrent in the last quarter is the Palobbia, which comes down from the mountains Listino and Galiner and is the greatest tributary of the Oglio: besides bringing water to the fields, it is what turned the mills and the forges. An arms with nothing allegorical about it, in short: there are the coins, the houses and the stream.

The raw material here is granite, and there is a great deal of it. For centuries the village had a community of stonecutters, a trade once very widespread that had almost entirely been lost: for some years now they have been taking it up again, and in 2009 they traced a didactic route called the Via della Pietra which starts from the built-up area and climbs the mountain among the quarries now out of use, inside the Adamello park. In the old peasant houses there remain the vaults, the granite portals of every period and the fountains made with the stone the torrent brings down. The parish church of the Purification of the Virgin Mary is recorded as early as 1439, has an eighteenth-century portal in Sarnico stone and an altarpiece by the Fiammenghino. And like every Camunian community Braone has its scütüm, the collective nickname: here they are the cats.