Zorzone, the mining village

On the origin of the name, Wikipedia reports as the most widely accepted theory that it comes from the Zorzi, one of the leading local families, and considers a link with the painter Giorgione less likely. In the sixteenth century Zorzone was one of the five “colonnelli”, the districts into which the municipality was divided, according to one of the Lombardia Beni Culturali archive records; with the reform of the town council in 1779 it elected two of the ten councillors. In 1636 it became a parish and in April 1797, under the Bergamo Republic, it even made itself an independent municipality, reabsorbed by Oltre il Colle as early as March 1798.

The municipal archive keeps the papers of two bequests to the people of the parish, which say a good deal about village life. The Marietti bequest came from the will of 10 November 1770 of Giovanni Antonio Palazzi, known as Marietto, who left meadows and a house to the villagers of Zorzone for charity; the Castellini bequest from the wills of Antonio Castellini (1801) and his niece Lucia (1803). In 1930, at the villagers' request, a plot belonging to the Castellini bequest was given for a nursery school, built with the help of the whole village and the parish; from 1953 the bequest's income went to the nursery, which in 1963 passed to the parish of the Santissima Trinità.

The mines of Oltre il Colle were divided into three areas: the first above Zorzone, at Pian Bracca, where the Val Vedra mine opened; the second on the Arera, where from the nineteenth century there was also an open-cast working called “Luna”; the third along the Val Parina and on the slopes of Monte Plassa. Mainly calamine, blende and galena were extracted, yielding zinc, lead and a little silver.

The mining drawings in the Gorno Mines archive preserve the names of the Val Vedra workings, Pian Bracca, Malanotte, Piazzole, Forcella, Ponente, Speranza, Bellavista and Fortuna, and record a “Vedra concession” as early as the first decades of the twentieth century. A 2020 geological study confirms that the Val Vedra mine, between the Menna and the valley, was partly worked in the 1970s, on levels between 940 and 1,070 metres; lower down ran the Riso-Parina tunnel, which linked the Val del Riso to the Val Parina.

The 1970s were the last season of investment. The archive holds the drawing of the entrance of the “ribasso Zorzone” adit (April 1971), the projects for a cableway at Cà Pasì (1970-1971), the building of a mining road at Case Pasini by the Rottigni company (1975), a 1979 study on ventilation between the Riso-Parina level and the Val Vedra and, as late as March to August 1980, a plan of the new outside works planned at Cà Pasì. Less than two years later the mines closed.

The sequence of companies, summarised in the table, can be reconstructed from the profiles in the Gorno Mines archive published by Lombardia Archivi: from 1870 the English firms Richardson and then Crown Spelter, then the Belgians of Vieille Montagne, who from the end of the nineteenth century held the concessions of Zambla, Monte Arera, Oltre il Colle and the Val Vedra and in 1922 also took over those of Crown Spelter.

In 1940 the Italian government expropriated Vieille Montagne and the concessions passed to state-owned companies. From 3 January 1942 SAPEZ, Società anonima piombo e zinco, owned the sites of Gorno, Oneta and Oltre il Colle, with 350 workers on shifts covering 24 hours. During the German occupation production came under the control of the Reich, and the mines also became a refuge: according to the testimonies collected by the Blog della Valserina many men hiding in the mountains of the valley found work in the SAPEZ mines. In 1954 SAPEZ was absorbed into AMMI, which at the end of 1978 merged into SAMIM, part of the Eni group.

SAMIM was the last concession holder: in 1982 it gave up the concession of the Val del Riso mines and ended extraction. The Gorno Ecomuseum dates the end to 12 January 1982, the Zorzone museum says 1980 and a 2020 geological study places the last underground work up to 1985. On the causes the sources stress prices: competition from countries able to sell zinc more cheaply, wrote Prima Bergamo in 2019, while in 2015 L'Eco di Bergamo pointed out that the mines had not closed for lack of ore.

The closed mines remained under concession. In 2014 the Australian company Energia Minerals obtained permits to resume work across Oltre il Colle, Gorno, Oneta, Premolo and Ardesio, and in 2015 it opened a site at Cà Pasì, with mining announced for the end of 2017 according to L'Eco di Bergamo. Mining never started, but the drilling found something.

In 2015, writes the study published in Mineralium Deposita, a drilling campaign from the old Val Vedra workings located, a few hundred metres beneath the village, the orebody called “Zorzone”: according to the company's declared estimates, 3.3 million tonnes of sulphides grading 4.9 per cent zinc, 1.3 per cent lead and 27.2 grams of silver per tonne. In 2025 the ministry suspended exploration because of some drilling outside the approved plan, reported by the company itself; in February 2026 it approved the environmental impact assessment after the fact, with conditions including consultation with Arpa and Uniacque and environmental monitoring.

The company Vedra, which has worked on the project since 2012, stated in May 2026 that it had spent about 16 million euros in fifteen years, that its mining plan was 90 per cent ready and that it could create up to 250 jobs; to get there, however, it needs a mining permit and investors.

Zorzone is also known as the village of frescoes. The idea came in 2006 from the then mayor Rosanna Manenti, who wanted to make the hamlet the “borgo degli affreschi”: between 2006 and 2009 three editions of a competition brought scenes from local history and the life of the past onto the house fronts.

After about twenty years the competition returned on 29 August 2026 with ValParinART, promoted by the Oltre il Colle library. Eight students from the “Giacomo e Pio Manzù” art high school in Bergamo, led by the teacher and painter Giovanni Bonaldi, painted seven new frescoes on the theme “C'era una volta”, once upon a time: among them “La funivia”, “Bat la ranza”, “Fà la fòia” and “Ol pustì” by Arianna Cortesi, which won the competition. With these works the village's frescoes now number 23, and on the same day the artist Frode painted the mural “Memorie di luce” on the museum façade.

A cable car between Oltre il Colle and Zorzone really did exist: a photograph dated 1958 in L'Eco di Bergamo's Storylab photo archive shows it, and the caption notes that it was dismantled when the hamlet could be reached by a convenient road. The museum, after all, stands on via Funivia, cable car street.

The walk is done on foot, starting from the car parks near the church. The stops:

CAI trail 231 starts in Zorzone, on via Giorgi, and follows the mule track that enters the Val Vedra along the hillside; it climbs the valley to Pian Bracca, the Pessel hut and the pastures of the Vedro dairy hut, then reaches the Passo di Val Vedra, at 1,848 metres, and ends at Passo Branchino, at 1,821, where it meets the trails to the Capanna 2000, the Alpe Corte hut and the Mezzeno huts.

CAI 234 starts instead from via Colombi and climbs north through the woods of the Val Carnera, passes the Mattuida farmhouse at 1,470 metres and with a final steep pull reaches the MAGA bivouac, at 2,005 metres, now the Rifugio Palazzi, then the ridge and the summit of Monte Menna, at 2,299 metres. On the Menna, just below the ridge at Pezzadello, the American bomber Lady Irene crashed on 4 October 1944; the museum's memorial recalls it. The technical data for both trails are in the table.