Taleggio

The cheese called Taleggio takes its name from this valley, and it was born of the need to keep the milk that was not drunk fresh. For centuries they called it stracchino, strachì, from the Lombard word for tired: it was made — and some still make it — with the evening milking, when the cows came back to the byre tired after a whole day at pasture. The name Taleggio, on the other hand, is recent, from the early nineteen hundreds, when the cheesemakers of the valley felt the need to tell their cheese apart from those coming from other areas; the man who worked hardest at it was Amilcare Arrigoni, born at Olda, who emigrated and made money in France in the restaurant trade and, coming home at the beginning of the century, set about reviving his valley starting precisely there. The denomination of origin came in 1988, the protected one in 1996. And production, for centuries a matter of the mountains only, has meanwhile spread down into the Po plain.

The comune is a scattered one and holds together four settlements: Olda, Sottochiesa, Pizzino and Peghera; the seat is at Sottochiesa, while Pizzino is perched on a rocky spur that once held a castle and looks down the whole valley. For nearly four centuries this valley was cut in two by a state frontier: from 1428 to 1797 Taleggio lay under the Republic of Venice while the neighbouring comune, Vedeseta, belonged to the duchy of Milan. And the division ran through the Church as well: Vedeseta was in the diocese of Milan, Taleggio in that of Bergamo. Two states and two bishops in a single valley.