Dizzasco

On the left bank of the Telo torrent stands the church of San Sisinnio, which is the parish church of Muronico but lies formally in the territory of Argegno: one village's church built on another's land. It is an eleventh-century building on a Greek-cross plan, widened and remade in the baroque age, with an eighteenth-century façade; inside there are scagliola antependia of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a Renaissance marble tabernacle and an inlaid confessional. Around this church stories of every kind have piled up. In 1848 the insurrectional committee organised by Andrea Brenta met here. In 1920, under the floor, the bodies of two priests were found, buried and tied together. And Winston Churchill, who admired this valley and came here to paint, made a canvas of it: that picture with San Sisinnio later left the valley to be exhibited in London, in a show devoted to the statesman.

Of 1848 the rest is worth telling. The patriot Andrea Brenta, supported by Giuseppe Mazzini, gathered a group of valley men and managed to block the Austrians and put them to flight: a plaque of 26 October of that year, set into a rock spur at Cavrano, records it. Mazzini, who was at Lugano, often came down into the valley to prepare the rising, which nonetheless failed: Brenta and Andreetti were arrested and shot at Como. Before all this Dizzasco belonged to the Five Comuni of the Mezzena, and the comune of Mezzena was the union of Dizzasco, Muronico and Rovasco; Muronico, in its turn, had grown out of an older nucleus, Sorianico, which stood where the cemetery is today and was abandoned because of an epidemic. The communal arms are very recent, of 2021, and put together the pieces of the village: a mulberry for Muronico, whose name perhaps comes from mòron, mulberry in Lombard; a donkey for Dizzasco; the keys of Saint Peter for the parish church; and stars for the hamlets. Along the Val Mulini the eighteenth-century workshops remain: the last mill stopped grinding in 1975.