Delebio

The battle of 1432 between the Visconti and Venice has stayed written in the place names of Delebio: there is still the Prato della Morte, the meadow of death, there is the ditch of the Venetians, there is via della Battaglia, and near the site of the clash stand the church of Santa Domenica with the chapel of Santa Maria della Vittoria and the little church of San Rocco. A village that walks every day over the names of that one day. Delebio appears for the first time as Alebio in a document of the second of April 724, a privilege of the Lombard king Liutprand, and in 1204 it was the first settlement in the Valtellina to constitute itself a free rural commune: it celebrated its eight hundred years in 2004.

The other force that remade the village is the river. In the flood of autumn 1520 the Adda, which until then flowed out into the lake of Mezzola, changed its bed and the new course cut Delebio in two; in 1928 the municipality had to cede to Dubino the lands of Careciasca and Nuovo Olonio, which the artificial channel of the Adda had by then separated from the rest. In 1894 the first electric power station in the province of Sondrio was switched on here. Three thousand one hundred and seventy-three inhabitants.