Lovero

Of Lovero the encyclopaedia says almost nothing: the name, the Valtellina dialect form Lùar, the province, and the list of the comuni it touches. But that list does say something. Lovero lies in the Valtellina, east of Sondrio, and covers a little more than thirteen square kilometres; and yet among the comuni bordering it there is Edolo, which is in another province and on the other side of the mountains, in the Val Camonica. That means that a territory as small as this climbs all the way to the watershed, and that the municipal boundary runs up there, along the ridge dividing two valleys and two provinces. It is the sort of information one gets not from history, which here is missing, but from administrative geography: sometimes the boundaries say more than the chronicles.

The only thing the entry on the comune points to is a power station, and it is worth looking at. It is a cavern power station, built that is inside the rock, and it works the water collected in the tanks of Grosotto, further up the valley. The catchment basin it draws on measures more than nine hundred square kilometres: about seventy times the surface of the comune that houses the machines. Inside there are two Francis turbines. It is a common arrangement in these valleys, where the water of whole mountain ranges is gathered, carried through tunnels and let fall; but it is worth saying plainly, because it is the only thing the record of this village keeps: a comune of a few hundred people whose mountain contains the machines that turn the water of a territory far larger than itself into electricity.