Vallio Terme

This village added a word to its own name by referendum. Until 1976 it was called simply Vallio — from the Latin vallus, which means valley — then the inhabitants voted and the comune became Vallio Terme. The baths had been founded in 1953 by Albino Berardi; the water is called Castello di Vallio and is recommended for the care of the liver and the digestive system. In little more than twenty years, in short, a private man's initiative had become the identity of the whole village, to the point of entering the register of names. The built-up area lies inside the valley run through by the Vrenda torrent, closed to the north and north-east by the Ere and Crovino mountains and to the south by Mount Fontanelle, the Olivo and the Tre Cornelli, five kilometres from Gavardo.

The Valle Sabbia, to which the comune belongs, has a long and stubborn history. Geographically it is the obliged passage towards the Tyrol and the lands of the Germans, and in the area of Provaglio there are mines of silver-bearing lead and copper whose working seems to have begun already in the third millennium before Christ. In the year 89 before Christ, following the Lex Pompeia and as Pliny recounts, the valley entered the Roman dominions together with the lands of the Triumplini and the Camuni; the valley people took it badly, and it needed the power of the legions of P. Silius and T. Drusus to put down, between 16 and 14 before Christ, the last pockets of resistance. Of that period there remain the epigraphs cited by Mommsen: the best known, today in the Roman Museum of Brescia, records the burial at Vobarno of the Roman P. Atinius, of the gens Fabia, in a place the text defines as «at the confines of Italy». Then the Lombards came, and with them, it seems, the systematic working of the iron mines that has made these valleys a capital of steel.