Capo di Ponte

At Capo di Ponte the stones are the most important thing there is. The village has the greatest number of engraved figures in the whole Valle Camonica, and on its territory stand three parks and a museum belonging to the site that in 1979 became the first in Italy to enter the UNESCO list: the national park of the Naquane rock engravings, the municipal one of Seradina-Bedolina, the national one of the Massi di Cemmo and the National Museum of the Prehistory of the Valle Camonica. Devotion here goes through boulders too: legend says that Saints Faustina and Liberata, who lived in penance in a cave, stopped with their hands two rocks about to fall on the village, and those two boulders, bearing the handprints, can still be seen beside the church dedicated to them.

The name says the village was born as the outskirts of another: between the eleventh and the fourteenth century Capo di Ponte was not a municipality but the tail end of Cemmo, and in the thirteenth century it was called in full Capo di Ponte di Cemmo. After the fall of the Republic of Venice the two names chased each other for sixty years: comune di Capo di Ponte in 1797, then Cemmo e Capo di Ponte, then Capo di Ponte e Cemmo, and only from 1859 the present name. The valley floor, meanwhile, was changing on its own: in 1315 the floods of the Re torrent covered the marsh of Imesigo, and the same torrent swept away the village of Zero, which after 1374 appears in no document again.