Museum of Minerals and Mining in Zorzone

The sources do not agree on the dates. The Comunità Montana Valle Brembana writes that the mineral exhibition had existed in embryo since 1970 in private premises and was opened in the former school in 1994. The Ministry of Culture places the start of the collection in the 1970s and the move to Zorzone in 1992, when the exhibition became a museum with two sections, minerals and the mine. The municipal leaflet sums it up this way: a mineral exhibition already active at the end of the 1970s, then the new premises opened in 1994.

The building is the hamlet's former primary school. The Lombardia Beni Culturali record describes it as a mid-twentieth-century construction on a square plan, with concrete and stone walls, brick-and-concrete floors and a gable roof covered in cement tiles. Since 29 August 2026 its façade has carried the mural “Memorie di luce” by the artist Frode, described below.

The ground floor is devoted to work underground. The most striking piece is the life-size reconstruction of a tunnel entrance. In the middle of the room stand a large pneumatic loader on rails, the pachèra, which filled the ore wagons, and the carèl, the small wagon the workers rode in.

Panels on the walls follow the story in chronological order: working methods, period photographs, means of transport and the treatment of ore outside the mine, survey plans of the Arera mines, St Barbara, patron of miners, and the crisis and closure told through newspaper cuttings. There are also dozens of photographs of the old miners, including many who died in the mines, and panels on mining songs and poems and on industrial archaeology, with pictures of the furnaces and silos.

The route opens with a topography of the Arera that the museum attributes to Leonardo da Vinci, sheet 12410 of the royal collection at Windsor, and with the hypothesis that Leonardo visited the basin between 1506 and 1507. The attribution should be treated with caution: in the Royal Collection sheet 912410 is titled “The Alps seen from Milan” and dated around 1510-1512, and as early as 2012 BergamoNews wrote that the identification with the Arera was still surrounded by doubts.

The first floor is the exhibition section. The figures change depending on who reports them: the Comunità Montana, the Ministry and ISPRA speak of 500 local specimens, 1,600 minerals from around the world and 450 fossils; the same Comunità Montana, describing the room, writes of more than 2,000 minerals; the municipal leaflet of about three thousand, arranged by type and origin. A separate case holds fluorescent minerals.

The most interesting pieces are the local ones. Alongside galena, lead sulphide, and blende, zinc sulphide, there are minerals that form when the sulphides weather, such as smithsonite, hydrozincite, hemimorphite and aurichalcite, as well as plattnerite, bournonite, malachite and wulfenite. It is the same distinction the miners made: the Gorno Mines Ecomuseum explains that in this area the “calamines”, the oxidised zinc minerals, were mined first, and blende later, when metallurgy allowed, with smaller amounts of galena.

A study published in 2020 in the journal Mineralium Deposita, based on the levels of the old Val Vedra mine, confirms the picture: sphalerite and galena as primary minerals, with a little pyrite and chalcopyrite, and smithsonite, hydrozincite, hemimorphite and cerussite as secondary minerals formed by the weathering of the sulphides. The fossils, found mostly in the mountains of the Brembana valley, include ammonites, gastropods, bivalves and sea urchins.

On the top floor, next to the meeting room, is the memorial to the Lady Irene. She was an American four-engined B-24 Liberator of the 885th squadron, which took off from Brindisi on 4 October 1944 on a secret mission to drop supplies to the Bergamo partisans. That night she crashed just below the crest of Monte Menna, at the place called Pezzadello, at about 2,250 metres.

There were thirteen people on board, ten American airmen and three Italians: La Voce delle Valli describes them as agents of the American secret service, the OSS, and only one of them is known by name. The sources also differ on the drop zone, near Lake Endine according to La Voce delle Valli, on the hills of San Fermo towards Lake Iseo according to the research quoted by L'Italo-Americano. The bodies were buried on the spot and later moved to Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery in St. Louis, in the United States; at the crash site stands a wooden cross made by the Trappist monks of New Melleray, in Iowa.

The memorial was opened in 2016 thanks to the research of Massimo Maurizio, a local history enthusiast from Oltre il Colle. It displays objects linked to the crash and some remains of the aircraft, including the kitchen utensils that villagers made at the time from its metal sheets.

The museum opens rarely, mainly on Sunday and holiday afternoons. The municipal leaflet gives Sundays and holidays, 15.00 to 17.00 from November to March and 15.00 to 18.00 from April to October, and every day from 1 August to the third Sunday of August, with openings by appointment for schools and groups. The Ministry of Culture, in its page updated in 2022, lists it instead as open on request with compulsory booking and a full ticket of €2.50, while the Comunità Montana still gives €1.50. The table below compares the sources: none is recent, and the safest thing is to phone 0345 95313, the number of the Associazione Amici del Museo.

The real mines have no visitor route open to the public: after the closure of the early 1980s the concessions passed to companies that carry out mineral exploration there. The 2014 municipal leaflet, however, listed two options linked to the museum: the “Riservetta”, a tunnel once used as an explosives store at Cà Pasì, open by appointment only, and a guided visit, also by appointment, to some industrial structures for processing the ore and to tunnels still in good condition.

We found no recent confirmation that these visits are still offered: ask the museum. To go into a mine on an equipped route you need to go to the Val del Riso, to the Gorno Mines Ecomuseum, whose official page lists guided visits on the second Sunday of every month at 15.00, booking required, lasting about three hours, with a temperature underground of about 10 degrees in every season.

Since the end of August 2026 the museum can be recognised from a distance. During ValParinART, the art day of 29 August, the Milanese artist Domenico Melillo, known as Frode, a lawyer and graffiti writer, painted a large mural on the façade with funding from the BIM. It is called “Memorie di luce”, memories of light: the word MUSEO is broken up into lines, arches and mountain profiles, and the large M that holds the composition together stands at once for museum, mountain, Menna and mine.

The mural also shows a little girl with a lantern, a reminder of the children exploited in the work of the past. On the same day seven new frescoes were painted on the houses of Zorzone, which now has 23.