Bedero Valcuvia

Towards the end of the nineteenth century a local writer recorded something that had just happened at Bedero: the whole territory of the comune and its houses, with the relative tax assessment, belonged to the Ospedale Maggiore of Milan, and when the administration decided to sell them it gave preference to the inhabitants. They knew how to take the chance: they joined together in a consortium and arranged the purchase of the lot on very convenient terms. From tenants and dependants they became owners, with little outlay and few sacrifices, and they at once set about clearing the ground and renewing the plantations, above all of mulberries and vines, managing to double their harvests. The same author notes that in spring the men left to look for work abroad and came home in winter to bring their earnings to their families, and that, being generally shrewd, it was not rare for them to build themselves a decent position; and that the village produced milk in abundance, bought every day by a cheesemaker from Bergamo to make stracchino and gorgonzola.

Bedero is called the balcony of the Valcuvia, because from up there the whole valley can be seen. The ground below the village interested the geologists of the nineteenth century, because it showed a fine example of rock rounded by ice and of moraines pushed into it; the studies of the time held the bare reddish humps of Monte Scerrè to be of volcanic origin, and supposed that in the glacial epoch a crater had stood nearby. Some of the reddish stones found on this territory have singular magnetic properties. On the summit of Monte Martica, above the village, are the remains of two artillery emplacements of the Frontiera Nord, built shortly before the First World War to face a possible attack by Germans or French through neutral Switzerland — or even an attack by the Swiss themselves. The trenches of the same line are just outside the village, on the road to Cunardo. The name is said to come from a word for the birch, or from a Celto-Germanic root meaning a village on a valley slope; in the map of the Duchy of Milan painted in the Vatican in 1581 it appears in the form Bedre.