Lodrino

The name may mean «free land». In 1931 Dante Olivieri put it down as pre-Latin and unspecified; in 2004 Ottavio Lurati traced it instead to the Old High German alōd, property free of feudal ties, which by way of medieval Latin alodium would have ended up as Lodrino. The first mention of the comune is in the Visconti tax roll of 1385, as «Comune de Ludrino», within the Quadra of Val Trompia; and already in the thirteenth century the lords de Lodrino owned property in Brescia and held political weight in the city.

The village, though, lived on iron. The Morandi, the family that dominated it, mined it at Bovegno and Collio, worked it here and sold it into the Val Sabbia; and from 1555 to 1564 it was Lodrino that supplied all the iron used for the dome of the Loggia of Brescia. Then, from the seventeenth century, famines, plagues and above all repeated floods broke that economy and sent many people to Switzerland. The settlement, unlike the others of the Val Trompia, does not sit on the valley floor but on the sunnier slopes, and the rocks around are of the same dolomite as the Dolomites.