Forcola

Forcola is a village that came down the hill. The oldest settlements are up above, on the slopes and inside the Val Fabiòlo — Alfaedo, Sostila, Case, Somvalle — and the first document attesting houses at mid-altitude is of 1323; the ones on the valley floor, by contrast, date from the middle of the nineteenth century, when the Austrians drained the land along the Adda and made the flat ground habitable. So the seat of the comune, Sirta, is the youngest part of the whole comune, while the old villages up there are reached by mule track and are now holiday houses.

With the descent came the big church. The parish church of San Giuseppe, at Sirta, was designed not by an architect but by an engineer, Clemente Valenti of Talamona: begun in 1877 and finished in 1896, it has a dome thirty-eight metres high, a considerable measure for a village that had only just reached the plain. Higher up stands San Gregorio, of the fourteenth or fifteenth century, altered over time. For centuries the whole district belonged to the pieve of Ardenno; and in 2017 a fire devastated the wood above Sirta.