Caspoggio

The oldest part of the village is called the Truna and is built as a single body: two parallel rows of houses, divided by a covered central passage more than twenty-five metres long, with the stables built in and the whole thing closed towards the outside. It is the housing of a frontier post, and indeed Caspoggio was born as the borough of the largest castrum in the Valmalenco, willed by the Capitanei, the lords of Sondrio, to stop invasions from the north: a knot of shepherds, craftsmen, labourers and soldiers with their families, whose purpose was to keep the fortress alive. The name too probably comes from there: from Castrum Podii, the castle on the knoll, whose ruins remain on a great spur of rock.

Through here ran the via Cavallera, more a mule track than a road, but a considerable short cut for the traffic between the north and the south of Europe: it split into two twin branches, one on each bank of the Mallero, and the right-hand one — the one Caspoggio stands on — led into Switzerland by the Maloja pass. Down that road, in the seventeenth century, also came the Landsknechts, the ones Manzoni names as bringers of the plague. It is no accident that the parish church, built in 1666, is dedicated to Saint Roch, the saint invoked against epidemics. The village stayed Catholic with a hard hand: the episode is remembered of the women of Caspoggio who with stones stopped a Protestant funeral in their church.