Edolo

In 1558 the village assembly of Edolo put caterpillars on trial. The grubs, as they called them, had overrun the cultivated fields, and the assembly resolved to banish them far from the crops: as befitted a proper legal proceeding, the caterpillars were assigned a defence counsel, one Bernardo di Fonatti. Fewer than fifty years earlier, in 1510, the same valley had burned sixty women accused of witchcraft, condemned by Paolo Zane, bishop of Brescia, for having caused drought and made people and livestock fall ill. The two episodes describe the same world, one in which the blame for a failed harvest had to fall on somebody.

Edolo, four thousand five hundred and nine inhabitants in the province of Brescia, sits at seven hundred and twenty metres at the mouth of the upper Val Camonica, where the Ogliolo comes down from the Val di Corteno to meet the Oglio. The bridge towards Mù was a toll crossing throughout the Middle Ages, first for the Federici family and then for the Griffi of Losine, and only the Austrian government abolished it, in 1836. The plague of 1630 killed seven hundred and twenty people between July and the following February, buried so close to the surface that wolves dug them up again. Today the Alta Via dell'Adamello sets out from the town, and the railway from Brescia ends here.