Barzago

On nineteenth-century maps the hill now called Verdegò carries another name: Merdegò in 1837 in Ignazio Cantù, Merdago in Fabi and still in Amati in 1878. The spelling with an initial V only takes hold around 1938: one letter quietly changed, and an embarrassing place name put away. Up there, tradition says, the first inhabitants settled — probably a Roman platoon, since a bronze sword and some potsherds were found there in the nineteen-thirties — and in 1998, while digging for a house, a rock-cut tomb of the third or fourth century came to light, now on the forecourt of the little church of Santi Pietro e Paolo. The name of the village itself would be the estate of the Barzia family, with the usual suffix -ago.

At Bevera, the hamlet named after the stream, stands the sanctuary of Santa Maria Nascente, consecrated in 1603, and its story exists in two versions. In the first a girl threatened by a local lordling — don Alfonso Isacchi, nicknamed the Bear of Barzago — takes refuge before an altar of the Madonna, who appears to her and speaks to her; the Sirtori, hearing of it, have the church built. In the second, told by Cesare Cantù in "La Madonna d'Imbevera", the Bear tries to kill don Alessandro Sirtori in the woods of Bevera and is himself killed in the duel, and the sanctuary is the survivor's thanksgiving. Which is true is hard to say: during the Second World War a bombing raid shattered the municipal historical archives.