Caiolo

Until 1522 the village was called Soltojo, perhaps from the Latin saltus, the wood, of which this land is full; in that year a council act, for reasons nobody knows, stopped writing Soltojo and wrote Cajolo instead, a name said to come from a family widespread in the Valtellina. Of the old name the tower of Soltojo remains, standing at 511 metres on a knoll inside a thick chestnut wood: from up there the valley was watched, but above all the signals were read of the other Caiolo tower and of a third tower set in the Rhaetian Alps. Tradition says Henry the Third had it built in 1041; more probably the Capitanei raised it in the thirteenth century. Not far off, the church of San Vittore rests on great arches above a rock face sheer over the Livrio torrent: it was built in 1617 on a medieval church, and keeps an altarpiece with the Adoration of the Child carved by Andrea da Milano, a pupil of Giovanni Antonio Amadeo.

On 16 March 1487 the battle of Caiolo was fought here. The Grisons had come down from the upper Valtellina as far as the plain, and waiting for them were the troops of the duchy of Milan led by Ludovico il Moro. They fought on the valley floor, between the Livrio and the Val Canale, on ground made marshy by the flooding of the Adda: among the reed beds the Milanese could lay ambushes, and perhaps that is why il Moro won and checked the designs of the Grisons for a while. The marsh, however, stayed. In 1589 Caiolo reached its peak, about fifteen hundred people, then came the plague of the sixteen hundreds; until 1700 there were famines, and wolves and bears attacked the beasts left at the alpine pastures. In the second half of the nineteenth century the population fell through emigration to America, Oceania and Switzerland, and through the goitre and intermittent fevers caught while working in the marshes where hemp was gathered: the problem was solved almost a century later, when the area was drained and the embankments of the Adda were built.