Civo

Civo has no centre: it is a set of small hamlets far apart from one another, scattered over the Costiera dei Cech, the sunny side of the Valtellina, and the town hall stands in one of them, Serone. The name almost certainly comes from the Latin clivium, slope, which is exactly what the place is. In 1587, however, the Grisons governor Giovanni Guler von Weineck wrote down another explanation, and it is worth repeating for the effort it took: the village would have been founded by one Caius Livius, arrived from Greece with the emperor Theodosius, who fought the Goths under Stilicho and, having crossed the pass of Bormio, ended up here where only wandering shepherds then moved about; and since Caius is usually written with a C., that C. joined to Livius would have given Clivio.

What strikes you, going round the hamlets, is how many churches there are and how big they are. They came after the Sacro Macello, the massacre of the valley's Protestants: in the forced return to Catholicism that followed, the building of monumental and grandiloquent churches was encouraged, sometimes wholly out of proportion to the inhabitants of the villages that raised them. So Caspano has the collegiate church of San Bartolomeo, perhaps of the twelfth century and enlarged from 1527; Roncaglia has San Giacomo, built in 1654 and consecrated in 1674, with frescoes by Carlo Innocenzo Carloni; Civo has Sant'Andrea, already there in the fifteenth century and rebuilt in 1697. The bridge lower down is called di Ganda, which in dialect means a field of stones.