Monno

The coat of arms of Monno was never granted by anybody: the comune adopted it itself and uses it as it is. Inside there is a local view, with an eagle and a deer taken from the old emblem of the Valcamonica, a bull for the cattle-rearing that has always been the mountain's trade, and a castle. That castle really existed: it belonged to the Federici and then to the local Corata family, which died out without heirs in 1733. Today practically nothing of it remains — a probable base inside the retaining walls of the parish church and two small shaped windows reused in the bell tower — and the only picture we have of it is inside the church, in a seventeenth-century ex voto. Legend has it that a pagan duke named Amont lived there, defeated in battle by Charlemagne near the nearby Mortirolo pass in 773, and from him the village name too is said to come.

On the church of San Brizio there is an inscription worth transcribing: it says that it was «king Charles» who had it built while he went about fighting for the faith, that pope Urban granted it nine hundred years of indulgence and that the seven bishops in his company added forty days each; the pardon falls every Friday and on the feast of San Brizio, the church's patron. At the end, the text dates the work to the sixth day of the seventh month of 1480 and records the restoration of 1657. The village customs are as precise as that inscription. In the last three days of Holy Week the young men go round the village sounding the còrign, in mourning for the death of Jesus. On the first of November the gabinàt was given — the name comes from the German Gaben Nacht, night of gifts — and the children went from house to house asking for boiled chestnuts and the special breads called bek and canàoi. On the second, the day of the dead, the log was left burning in the hearth to warm them. In the Camunian dialect the nickname of the people of Monno is Gàcc, cats; in the kitchen they make calsuncèi and gnòc de patàpe crüe.