Cornello dei Tasso

Cornello dei Tasso is a frazione of Camerata Cornello in the upper Val Brembana, hung on a rocky terrace 691 metres above the Brembo river. There is no road into the village — you park at the church of San Bartolomeo on the valley road and walk in along a stone-paved mule path. The Tasso family was born here in the 12th century and, starting in the 1490s, built and operated the first integrated European postal network from a base in Bergamo, eventually serving the Habsburg empire and giving its name to the Tassis / Thurn und Taxis dynasty whose postal monopoly survived in parts of Germany until 1867.

The Museo dei Tasso e della Storia Postale in the village traces the network's century-by-century expansion and exhibits original postal markings, route maps and uniforms. Beyond the museum, the village itself is the attraction: stone houses with wooden balconies, vaulted alleys, and the small square in front of the Chiesa dei Santi Cornelio e Cipriano. The poet Bernardo Tasso and his son Torquato (author of Gerusalemme Liberata) trace their ancestry here.