Fusine

During building works in the town hall, down in the basement, the old archive of the comune turned up: papers running from 1325 to 1843. They were assessed in 1988 and then taken to the State Archive of Sondrio to be reordered and catalogued. Five centuries of a village's business — the taxes, the pastures, the quarrels, the accounts — had been sitting down there without anyone knowing. Of the same kind is the other date that counts here: on 19 November 1589 the church of San Lorenzo martire separated from the mother church of Berbenno and became a parish, with the right of patronage in the hands of the comune — that is, with the village choosing its own priest.

Fusine was one of the comuni of the middle third of the Valtellina, under the jurisdiction of Sondrio, at the beginning of the fifteen hundreds; and the Valtellina, in those centuries, was not Italian but subject to the Grisons. Under the Cisalpine Republic, in 1801, the village was one of seventy comuni of the third district of Sondrio, in the department of the Lario. Later the Austrians thought of making two separate comuni here, Fusine and Val Madre, and then left them together. The territory is wide and almost all mountain: it borders seven comuni, and one of them, Foppolo, is over the ridge, in the province of Bergamo.