Colere

A village called Colere never existed: what bears the name is a cluster of hamlets gathered in the basin below the Presolana, from the 751 metres of the Dezzo hamlet to the 2521 of the summit. People came up here for the ore, which surfaces at around two thousand metres and was already being worked before the Romans to get copper, zinc and blende. The whole Scalve valley, for that matter, had obtained from emperor Henry II privileges that came close to independence: exemption from military service, freedom of hunting and fishing, tax relief and the right to work the mines to supply the imperial army. And at Colere, the sources say without mincing words, no nobles or rich burghers ever settled, only labour.

On the first of December 1923 the hamlet of Dezzo was swept away by the wave of the Gleno, the dam that gave way upstream, and was destroyed along with Dezzo di Azzone: the victims were many. A few years later, in 1927, the fascist reorganisation of municipalities joined Colere to Azzone in a single body called Dezzo di Scalve. Independence came back only in 1947, and taking it back required a raid: the citizens of Colere stormed the town hall at Dezzo to carry the municipal archive home. Dezzo, which had been the seat, went back to being a hamlet, and one split in half between Colere and Azzone at that.