Erve

Erve is cut lengthwise by the Gallavesa torrent, and the houses on the two banks are joined by a great many bridges: that is what gives the village a shape of its own. One of those bridges, the one in the coat of arms, dates from the Venetian period; the lily beside it comes instead from the arms of the Valsecchi. In the Statutes of the Val San Martino, of 1435, Erve is registered as a poor land, and for that very reason authorised to keep goats.

How poor it was, the parish papers say: the money for works of faith came from the chestnut or the hay harvest, and the oil for the lamp of the Blessed Sacrament was pressed from walnuts. For centuries people left — turners and charcoal burners for Venice, and in the twentieth century workers for Calolziocorte, Lecco, Milan, Switzerland and France. The road came late: the project had been abandoned at the end of the nineteenth century because the comune could not afford it, and only in September 1911 was the carriage road from Rossino opened; the asphalt dates from 1956. Until 1992 Erve was in the province of Bergamo, and then passed with the whole Val San Martino to the new province of Lecco.