Sormano

In 1555 the Spanish governor sent a captain to Asso with orders to pull down all the castles of the valley: they were badly ruined and unsafe, repairing them would have cost too much, and if they were left standing they could serve as shelter for enemies or adventurers. So the castle of Sormano came down as well. It had survived Frederick Barbarossa, who had decreed the demolition of the strongholds but had spared this valley because the Vallassina was on his side; it did not survive the accountants of Charles the fifth. Its stones ended up in the new parish church and in a good many houses. In the second half of the twentieth century, where the castle had stood, they raised a battlemented wall of rough stone with a serizzo portal and the arms of the Sormani, and beside the portal they set a plaque that tells its story in brief.

The name has been connected to a supposed Lombard people, but it is really a Celtic word meaning a torrent — and the source adds, honestly, that it is not currently known how that word differed from its apparent synonyms; it will have named first the stream and then the valley. The first time the village is put down in writing is in a document of the twenty-eighth of August 1179, and it is not a flattering mention: it records that a certain Ottone di Sormano, who had taken Barbarossa's side against Milan during the siege of 1161, had been declared an enemy by the comune of Milan. From here come the Sormani, who moved to Canzo and then to Milan and to Paris, and one of them, Gaspare, came back in 1523 as governor of the whole valley. The comune has also lost its own name once: on the twelfth of February 1928 the fascist government dissolved the administration and renamed it Santa Valeria, installing a podestà who ruled over Caglio and Rezzago as well; the three comuni took back their names and their elections on the twentieth of August 1947. And above the village climbs the Muro di Sormano, one of the hardest ascents road cycling has used.