Pertica Alta

The name comes from a Lombard custom: when a warrior fell or went missing in battle far from home, his family raised a pertica, a pole, topped with the image of a dove, turned towards the place where it had happened. The comune as such is recent: it was created in 1928 by the merger of Bel Prato, Livemmo and Navono, and today it holds together six settlements — Belprato, Lavino, Livemmo, Navono, Noffo and Odeno. One of them, Noffo, has no church at all, and its people have always looked to the parish church of Lavino. Belprato was called simply Prato until 1863, when a royal decree put the «Bel» in front of it to tell it apart from other places of the same name in the kingdom: a village paid a compliment by decree.

Long before the comune there was the Universitas Perticae Vallis Sabbi, an organisation standing above the single villages, certainly at work from 1382 and lasting until 1797, which also took in the present territory of Pertica Bassa and the villages of Bisenzio and Presegno. The coat of arms of today takes nothing from the emblems of the comuni that formed Pertica Alta — the ox of Livemmo, the three boundary stones side by side of Navono, the rampant lion of Odeno — and is instead a variation of the one the comune had freely given itself in 1950. In 2022 the hamlet of Livemmo was chosen among the villages financed by the national plan: the Region judged it the best of the thirty-two Lombard proposals and paid out to it just under twenty million euros.