Zone

At Cislano the ground holds up in balance the very thing that ought to crush it: these are the erosion pyramids, columns of earth several metres high, each with a boulder on top. It is the boulder that makes the column, because it shelters the earth beneath it from the rain while everything around is washed away. In 1975 the municipality put three of them on its emblem, with the words Communitas alpina zonensis between two fir branches. The name of the village, according to the historian Alessandro Sina, comes instead from jugone, an augmentative of the Latin jugum: the pass, the Croce di Zone, which links the Valcamonica with the Val Trompia.

In February 1925 an outsider arrived as prefectural commissioner, Giovanni Berghinzoni, who at once went after the parish priest and the nursery school, imposed a tax on the free pasturing of goats and forbade the singing of anti-fascist songs. The village had already been marked down by the party bosses as outlaw. On 16 March some seventy women, setting out from Cislano and from the centre, climbed the town hall stairs in silence, burst into the commissioner's office, pinned him down and took his pistol away; they tried to throw him down the stairs, but someone came to his aid and he fled. Five people were arrested, and fascism never took root in Zone.