Dazio

Dazio is one of the smallest comuni in the province of Sondrio: three and a half square kilometres, in a flat hollow hidden behind the Colmen, the height that carries its name and that acts as the watershed between the lower and the middle Valtellina. It stands at the eastern end of the Costiera dei Cech, the Rhaetian slope that runs from the mouth of the Valchiavenna to the furrow of the Valmasino. Of this village wrote also Giovanni Guler von Weineck, the Grison governor of the Valtellina between 1587 and 1588, who devoted a few lines to it in his description of the valley. In 1963 Dazio ceded the hamlet of Pilasco to the comune of Ardenno, and since then its boundaries have been those of today.

With so little land one could not live, and from the seventeenth century onwards people left: the destination was Rome. The men of Dazio went there to be orzaroli, that is to sell bread and foodstuffs, and some of them, by dint of rigorous thrift, put aside notable earnings. Every Valtellina colony in Rome had a shrine dedicated to the patron saint of its own village, and the one of the men of Dazio was dedicated to San Provino: they took their saint with them. Of that emigration a trace has remained in the surnames too: Caporali comes from the rank the men of Dazio obtained once they had arrived. The church of San Provino, in the village, was consecrated in 1690: it has a baroque front, a single nave with six side altars, and on the high altar a wooden ciborium, carved, gilded and painted, with two angels at its sides holding the lamps, their wings gilded. Today Dazio lives on a few craft, farming and tourist activities, and on many second homes; for work, people go down to the valley floor.