Collio

In a mountain village at eight hundred metres, between 1502 and 1538, the Fracassini brothers printed books. They were suspected of producing heretical pamphlets, and the historian Paolo Guerrini writes that in 1543 merciless heretical propaganda was being made at Collio: a printing house in the upper Val Trompia, above the mines. For mines are what this place has always lived on: the "iron road" of the Val Trompia passed here from Roman times, when extraction was forced labour and the place served as a prison. The mine of Sant'Aloisio, with the miners' buildings restored, can be visited today.

Iron also created border problems: in 1563 the captain of Brescia ruled that the miners of Collio and their muleteers could not carry the ore they dug into any foreign land. On 8 May 1555 a fire burnt two hundred and sixty houses in the district of Tizio. From the church at Memmo comes the Mariegola of Collio, an illuminated codex of 1523 now in the Diocesan Museum of Brescia. And there is a priest to remember: don Giovanni Bruni, parish priest and naturalist, who found fossils on Monte Colombiane, made meteorological observations and was the first to climb the Corna Blacca; in 1930 the Ateneo of Brescia proposed naming it after him. Between 1892 and 1922 eighty-seven people of Collio emigrated to the United States, almost all to Monongahela, near Pittsburgh.