Castello dell'Acqua

On the coat of arms of this Valtellina village, granted in 2009, there is a fish, and in the village they tell you why. The device is said to have been commissioned by Baldinello of the Dell'Acqua family from the painter Todeschino da Barletta, who was asked for a caparisoned knight, the castle tower, the water and the pesc: except that pesc, in the local dialect, meant then and still means the fir tree, while to a painter from Apulia it could only mean a fish. The same source, however, warns that this story has never been recognised or documented by any archive, and that in all probability it has always been a students' tale. For that matter, of the Dell'Acqua too, the Ghibelline family from which the comune takes its name and which was dominant here in the twelfth century, no historical records survive to reconstruct their rise: only their presence in the castle is certain, and of that the ruins are what can be seen today. And the inhabitants are not called castellani, as one would think, but marà or maràn: according to the local account, from the word marrani, which is said to be how the Valtellina nobles called them.

What can be touched with the hand, instead, are the tools. The village's chief monument is the Fucina Cavallari, real industrial archaeology: here the implements of daily use were forged with iron that came from the nearby Val Belviso, and it went on working until 1980, when it was abandoned; then the mountain community recovered it and made it visitable. Beside it a water mill with horizontal blades has also been recovered, and the complex of the Pila, which served to husk chestnuts and cereals. The rest of the comune is woodland, between the torrents Malgina and Armisa, and the people live scattered among more than twenty hamlets, several of which are emptying: at Bruga, at the foot of the Val d'Arigna, one can still find the wood-fired ovens of the three families who lived there.