Bienno

Bienno sits on the eastern flank of the middle Val Camonica, north of Lago d'Iseo. From the tenth century the Benedictines diverted the Grigna stream into an artificial canal, which still powers a string of fucine, small water-hammer forges, along its course. The valley was working iron from the bloomery furnaces of late Antiquity through the high blast furnaces of the late Middle Ages; Bienno became the master village, what Brescia called il paese dei magli, the village of the hammers.

The centro storico runs along the stream in stone houses, frescoed facades and arcaded passages, the forges set directly into the fabric of the lanes rather than gathered apart from them. The palace and the ethnographic museum sit within this same fabric, holding the tools, costumes and reconstructed workshops that explain what the canal was built to serve. Each August the streets fill again with working forges and craftsmen from across the Alpine arc, a working echo of the trade the canal was dug for so long before. What the town amounts to is this: a village organized, street by street, around a single diverted stream and the iron it was made to move.