Cremeno

The arms of Cremeno say who gave the orders, and in what order. The mountains, the woods and the wild animals are the landscape; the tower recalls the Torriani, the family that ruled Cremeno and the Valsassina; the sword and the bishop's crozier point instead to the archbishops of Milan, who held them before. Under the Duchy of Milan, Cremeno was the chief place of the so-called Squadra del Consiglio. The settlement may be Roman in origin: the territory was crossed by the via Spluga, the road that linked Milan to the Splügen pass, and that is enough to explain why a mountain village carried administrative weight for centuries.

The figures tell of a village joined and unjoined more than once. In the eighteenth century the inhabitants were a little over five hundred; in 1809 Cremeno was annexed to Barzio, and in the middle of the nineteenth century it counted fewer than seven hundred. In 1901 they were six hundred and seventy-one, and in 1931, after the annexation of Cassina Valsassina and of Moggio, the figure jumps to one thousand four hundred and fifty-seven; then, in 1951, it is back to six hundred and fifty-five, because the two comuni had gone their own way again. From the nineteen-seventies the village changed its trade, from farming to holidaymaking. In the church of San Rocco, of the sixteenth century, an altarpiece of the saint painted by Stefano da Pianello in 1523 is preserved.