Ossimo

In the arms of Ossimo there are three towers, and one of them belongs to a village that is no longer its own. They stand for the three hamlets that once made up the comune — Ossimo Superiore, Ossimo Inferiore and Cogno — but Cogno today is in the comune of Piancogno. It was the part down on the valley floor, and it was worth something: in 1961 five hundred and eighty people lived there and paid their taxes to the two mountain comuni, and the Olcese cotton mill, which stood on its ground, brought in about five million lire a year. When in 1959 the people of the hamlet asked to break away and make a new comune down in the valley, Ossimo declared itself against at once, for fear of losing income essential to its budget; the meetings and the arguments went on for three or four years, until the prefectural commissioner approved the separation and Ossimo was practically obliged to give up a good part of the valley floor. To meet the Ossimesi halfway, Borno and Piancogno put it in writing that they renounced every claim on the comune's income-bearing property, and that the agreement was definitive and irretractable.

The name has two possible explanations: a Germanic one, from the roots Hòf-Höf meaning «height», and a Latin one, Auximum, from a personal name; in the papers of the monastery of Santa Giulia in Brescia a document of 950 records a Ussium, probably this place. The first settlements on the Altopiano del Sole go back three thousand years before Christ, above all in the localities of Pat and Asinino-Anvoia. In 1670 the plague struck hard and the sick were taken to the lazaretto at Pat, where a chapel was built to remember it. The church of San Carlo, raised outside the village on a point that dominates the Val Camonica after the presumed visit of Carlo Borromeo in 1580, was begun around 1614 and suspended in October 1616, because the inhabitants wanted to administer the alms money themselves, without the rector: it was finished only in 1618.