Mazzo di Valtellina

The village bears the name of a family, and the family then took the name of another valley. The de Mazia, or von Matsch, came from the Val di Mazia in the Val Venosta and came down into the Valtellina in the eleventh century, charged by the emperor Henry IV with keeping the Alpine passes open for imperial troops; once here they had themselves called Venosta, after the land they had left, while the village went on being called after them. The bishop of Como gave them feudal rights over Mazzo, which they held until 1512, and of the system of fortifications they had built within some twenty kilometres only the tower of Pedenale remains here.

In the dialect, on the other hand, the Lombards have stayed: sberlüsc is lightning, güdàzz the godfather, maschérpa ricotta, stracch tired, grignà to laugh, biótt naked and ghèi money. The first written record is from 795, when the emperor Lothar names the parish of Mazzo, which stretched from Sernio to Sondalo; a document of 1240 lists it as one of the four principal parishes of the diocese of Como. In the Santa Maria complex, where a medieval baptistery, the church of 1452 and a seventeenth-century oratory are linked by an internal loggia, an altarpiece of 1489 by Giovanni Malacrida is preserved.