On 7 July 1843 Camillo Golgi was born here, who in 1906 became the first Italian to receive a Nobel prize: the one for medicine, announced on 25 October, two weeks before the academy also decided on Giosuè Carducci. Golgi spent his first fifteen years in the village and came back often afterwards, even on his honeymoon; in 1956 the comune, which had been called simply Corteno, added his surname to its own. The village has a museum named after him.
Before that Corteno was a mountain community with its own rules and its own quarrels. In 1299 the consuls of the vicinia swore fealty to the bishop of Brescia, and among the tithes owed to the curia was the right to the thigh of every bear caught. In 1798, on the feast of the Assumption, the quarrel with the men of the Val di Scalve over the Cülvègla pasture ended badly: they attacked the summer farm and drowned the cheesemaker in the whey, the men of Corteno climbed the mountain in two groups and, at the signal of the consuls — a red handkerchief — came down and made a massacre. The stream has been called Val Rösa ever since.
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Near Corteno Golgi
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
