Paspardo

Of this Valcamonica village we know precisely what it cost. The registers of the bishop's table at Brescia record that from 1308 and for more than a century Paspardo owed the bishop a long series of dues, and among them was a singular one: the men of Paspardo and Cimbergo were bound to take from the crags of the mountain the nests of falcons and sparrowhawks, falconum et accipitrum, for the bishop's hunting. To the advocate residing at Cemmo they had instead to bring every year a bundle of wooden shingles to roof the houses. Already in 1298 two men of the village, one Rosso and an Adamo known as Pollicino, had stood surety for a rent to be paid in salted and dried fish. The next year the consuls of the vicinia went down to Cemmo to swear fealty and pay the tithe, and a few days later the bishop's vicar leased to them and to the men of Cimbergo the lands of Zero, which the inhabitants had given up because they could not pay the agreed rents: a flood of the Re torrent had destroyed that village. Being the bishop's men, however, came in useful: when the counts of Lodrone, having obtained Cimbergo, tried repeatedly to take the mountains of Paspardo as well, it was precisely that subjection which let the village say no.

Above the built-up area, at a place called Castél, there is a crag that dominates the valley floor and is within sight of the castle of Cimbergo. In 2011 the consortium of the rock engravings of Ceto, Cimbergo and Paspardo had it excavated, and the name of the place proved right: beneath there emerged a fortification on several levels, with its curtain wall, its entrance portal, its keep and a Venetian-style cistern for filtering water, plus a later reworking. What it was for remains an open question, though, because of that castle no historical document keeps any trace. A village whose fish, hawks and shingles are all known, in short, has a fortress nobody ever wrote down. The rest is a plateau at a thousand metres facing the Concarena, with its anvólcc and raólcc, the supporting arches and the covered vaulted streets, and houses that hide threshing yards within. The people farmed, herded, went to the Camunian mines, and at the beginning of the seventeenth century the Venetian delegate Da Lezze noted that many went to Venice to work as porters, labourers and basket-makers.