Grosio

The older women of Grosio still wear a costume that has no equal in the valley: bright colours, deep necklines, jewellery, silk bows and hats with ostrich feathers, and in their ears the urecìn di bròchi, gold rings with a stud that until the twentieth century came straight from Venice. The explanation given in the village is a legend, unconfirmed by any document: it would be the dress of Circassian, Balkan or Ottoman slave women, bought and then married by the men of Grosio who had emigrated to the Serenissima.

The same tradition says that it was those women who brought buckwheat here, which from Grosio and Teglio spread through the whole Valtellina and is still the basis of pizzoccheri. Far older, above the village, is the Rupe Magna: a rock more than eighty metres long, covered with thousands of figures carved between the fourth and the first millennium before Christ, one of the largest engraved surfaces in the whole Alpine range. On the same ridge stand two castles, one founded by bishops and the other by the Visconti.