Premana

Premana is a village built to defend itself. The houses stand pressed against one another in a continuous curtain, so as to form a wall; the vaulted underpasses, closed by wooden gates, were the entrances to the village, and in the houses beside them a window cut obliquely into the wall allowed people to watch whoever was arriving. There were corner towers, and above all the overpasses: first-floor passages that stride over the alleys and join the houses of opposite blocks, so that the whole village could be crossed under cover and abandoned without going down into the street. The last refuge was up above, where the parish church of San Dionigi stands today: the bell tower was the old watchtower, and the crossbow window can still be seen.

The other constant is iron. Premana became a mining and iron-working centre of the Duchy of Milan, and its arms carry a shovel, a pick and a lit miner's lamp; the former Bellati forges date from 1759. From that tradition grew the district of scissors and cutting tools: Sanelli was founded here in 1864, and here too is the head office of CAMP, whose initials stand for Costruzione Articoli Montagna Premana and which makes mountaineering equipment. The village lies in the Valvarrone, below Monte Legnone, and has twelve mountain pastures: the Giir di Mont, the race that links them all, is thirty-two kilometres with two thousand four hundred metres of climb.