Sella Giudicarie

This comune was born on the first of January 2016 from the merger of four villages — Bondo, Breguzzo, Lardaro and Roncone, which is its seat — and the first thing it did was to give itself a coat of arms that counted them all. It is quartered, one box per community, but it does not merely lay out four symbols: at the top is the stylised image of the saddle of Bondo, the one that gives the comune its name, drawn so that the line binding the upper part of the shield stretches down until it becomes the lake. Then there are the torrents Adanà and Arnò, tributaries the one of the Chiese and the other of the Sarca, and they are there to say something precise: the territory is the watershed between two basins, and the water that falls here takes two different roads.

The four quarters can be read one by one. In the first is the local war memorial, which came from the arms of Bondo. In the second is the goddess Runcina, divinity of hoeing, with a sheaf of corn and a sickle: it is the symbol of Roncone, that is a play on words upon a minor agricultural deity, still standing on a municipal shield approved in the twenty-first century. In the third the red lily of Saint John with a miner's hammer and shovel crossed, which come from Breguzzo and say that here men dug. In the fourth a fortified building with a gold star, which was the emblem of Lardaro. At Bondo there is also a monumental Austro-Hungarian cemetery: the front, in these parts, really did pass through.