The mining area of Dossena might be one of the most ancient farming mountains of Bergamo: the ancient cultivation of the area seems to date back to the Bronze Age.
It is supposed that Romans used to send sentenced damnati ad metalla, slaves sentenced to forced labour in the mines for the mineral extraction. Plinio il Vecchio in his Naturalis Historia mentioned Bergamo as place of calamine extraction and possible location to which he refers as the mine of Dossena – Oltre il Colle.
Some of the minerals collected in the mine of Dossena were calamine, argentiferous galena and starting from the 20th century, fluorite, a mineral used in the glass industry and metallurgy for lowering the melting temperature and for the production of hydrofluoric acid.
