Mello

There is a famous valley that bears the name of this village although it does not even touch it: the val di Mello, a tributary of the val Masino, lies some twenty kilometres away and is so called because the people of Mello — who are called melat — have held grazing rights up there for centuries. The village itself stands in a sunny and panoramic position on the Costiera dei Cech, the side of the lower Valtellina that faces south. Above the houses are the remains of the castle of Domofole, which some call the castle of the Queen: its first mention is in a document of 1023, and in the eleventh century it belonged to the Vicedomini, a powerful feudal family from Como that had settled in the lower Valtellina before the year one thousand. At the end of the thirteenth century, during the wars between Guelphs and Ghibellines, the castle was destroyed and the Vicedomini driven out of the valley; a few years later the fortification was rebuilt.

The parish of Mello appears in documents from 1441, the year in which it ceased to depend on the archpriest's church of Sant'Alessandro at Traona and San Fedele became autonomous; the present church was begun in 1591 and finished only in 1670. To the parish also belongs the church of San Giovanni di Bioggio, and there an old tradition places, from the thirteenth century, one of the first communities of Franciscan tertiaries: among them, in the fifteenth century, one little friar was noted for holiness, whom the people called San Genuari, that is Gennaro, and his bones, kept under the high altar, are venerated to this day. The census of 2011 tells another story in a few lines: in the main village 834 people lived, at Consiglio 160, and in the localities of Poira di Dentro and Poira di Fuori Pecoia, which have a name all the same, nobody lived any more.