Discover what to see and do in Cornello dei Tasso, one of Italy’s most beautiful medieval villages. Explore the history of the Tasso family, inventors of the postal service, and take a dip into the Middle Ages among historic architecture and local legends.
History
If you visit Cornello dei Tasso, belonging to the municipality of Camerata Cornello, you will feel as if you are stepping back in time to the Middle Ages. In fact, this village, rightly counted among the most beautiful in Italy, stands on a rocky point overlooking the Brembo River. To reach it you have only two ways: on foot or via mule tracks, ancient unpaved dirt roads. The centuries-old isolation, however, has been the hamlet’s good fortune, because it has allowed its ancient urban structure to be preserved intact. But Cornello has many other things to discover: in the Badger and Postal History Museum you will find numerous documents related to the activities of the noble and ancient Tasso family, originally from the village, which played a very important role in communications at the European level, inventing the postal service and even the cab. Don’t miss the famous Penny Black, the first postage stamp issued in the world! And finally: Camerata Cornello also has a crime story past… in the early 1900s one of its inhabitants became the protagonist of a ruthless massacre. Continue reading and find out the details!
The origins of cab service
The cab, as anticipated, is an outgrowth of the European postal service born of the resourcefulness of the Tasso family, whose punctual and zealous work earns the trust of monarchs. He thus receives several other assignments, including the transportation of tax revenues. To carry it out, he uses carriages in which, at times, passengers are also accompanied. According to some scholars, this is how the embryo of the “cab” service was born, which would take its name from the “cab” family.
Badger Family
Documents preserved at the State Archives of Bergamo and the Parish of Camerata Cornello establish that the Tasso family originated in the medieval village of Cornello: the progenitor is Omodeo, mentioned as early as 1251. His descendants are very active: over the following centuries, some turn out to be among the founders and managers of the Compagnia dei Corrieri della Serenissima, which looked after connections on the Venice-Milan and Venice-Rome lines, others organized the Papal Post Office, and still others won contracts for postal communications from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, becoming master generals of the Imperial Post Office for centuries. In the seventeenth century, the German branch of the family known as Thurn und Taxis even obtained the princely title.
One of the most beautiful villages in Italy
Cornello dei Tasso now stands in an isolated place along the old route of the “Via Mercatorum,” but it was not always so. This road, which led to Valtellina, for a time favored trade and made Cornello the site of the most important market in the valley. With the construction at the bottom of the valley of the via Priula in the late 1500s, however, the village was effectively cut off from the most important trades. The urban fabric of Cornello is characterized by the superimposition of four different building levels. The first two levels consist of horizontal fortification buildings and a porticoed street topped by stone arches. The third, more open settlement level is occupied by dwellings, including also the palace of the Tasso family, separated from the other houses and located on a rocky outcrop on the southern side of the village, serving as a guard to the valley. On the fourth level is the church dedicated to Saints Cornelius and Cyprian equipped with a Romanesque-style bell tower, very rare in the Brembana Valley. Inside the building, along the walls, you can admire a cycle of frescoes very complex in terms of themes and styles; it is speculated that, among the painters, there may have been Baschenis from Averara. Finally, on the frame of the altarpiece with the Crucifixion from 1635, the coat of arms of the Tasso family is clearly visible, with the post horn and yew tree.
Noir: the story of Simone Pianetti
If you hear a Bergamascan say , “I’m doing like Pianetti,” you better run, and fast! He is in fact referring to a violent and bloody incident in Camerata Cornello when Simone Pianetti killed seven people and then managed to escape capture. Originally from the small hamlet of Lavaggi, a hamlet of Camerata Cornello, he emigrated to New York to seek his fortune. Upon returning to the Brembana Valley, he is reduced to poverty by local backbiting and begins to meditate revenge against those who forced him into that situation. On July 13, 1914, he kills, in order: Domenico Morali, conduit doctor of the villages of Camerata Cornello and San Giovanni Bianco; municipal secretary Abramo Giudici and his daughter Valeria; shoemaker Giovanni Ghilardi; parish priest Don Camillo Filippi; municipal messenger Giovanni Giupponi; and Caterina Milesi (with whom he had an open dispute). After the massacre he vanished into the mountains. In the meantime, the people begin to see him as a kind of Robin Hood and a liberator, compared to the strong powers (mayor, doctor, etc.); his absconding in the upper Brembana valley is also aided by the complicity of coalmen and shepherds living there. Information about Pianetti’s fate is uncertain and divergent: those who give him refugee in the mountains for many years, those who have him die shortly after meeting his son, and those who have him emigrate to America. What is certain is that his figure remains to this day the subject of legends, anecdotes, and folk tales, as well as the protagonist of recent publications and songs by Bergamo bands, including Folkstone and the SCS Kitchens.