Patron saint festival In 206 days
Feast of Saint Victor
📅 Every year, on 8 May
On 8 May Mese, a municipality of 1,747 inhabitants in the province of Sondrio, celebrates its patron Saint Victor, to whom the parish church is dedicated.
To the people of Chiavenna, Mese was «Ultriro», the land beyond the Liro: a name that says only which side one was looking from. The toponym Mese, on the other hand, appears in a parchment of 1016, for the sale of a tenant farm, and throughout the Middle Ages the meadows, fields and woods were worked by tenants on behalf of owners from Chiavenna or church bodies from Como. The identity of a village came later, and was built around the two churches of San Mamete and San Vittore; the old nickname was forgotten.
In the sixteenth century Mese stood apart from the rest of the Valchiavenna for how deeply the Protestant Reformation took root among the peasants of the settlements towards the Liro. Among their ministers was Paganino Gaudenzio, who later converted to Catholicism and ended up teaching at the University of Pisa, the author of some fifty works. About ten evangelical families stayed on here even after the treaty of Milan of 1639, which forbade in the Valchiavenna and the Valtellina any worship other than Catholic. Much later came the other thing the village is known for: the hydroelectric power station, inaugurated in 1927 before the crown prince Umberto of Savoy and held at the time to be the most powerful in Europe.
🎉 Festivals and feasts in Mese 1
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Straight-line distances from the town centre. Tap a point to open its page.
Near Mese
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
Places to see within 25 km
Outside Mese, but an easy day trip away.
Chiesa di Sant'Ignazio di Loyola 📍 Carpi · 11 km Jesuit church of 1670-1682 in Carpi, on a Greek-cross plan, with scagliola altars and the diocesan museum. Basilica cattedrale di Santa Maria Assunta 📍 Carpi · 11 km Carpi cathedral begun in 1514 to Peruzzi's design, reopened in 2017 after the 2012 earthquake. Chiesa di Santa Maria in Castello 📍 Carpi · 12 km Romanesque pieve of 1184, the oldest church in Carpi, with a Peruzzi façade and twelfth-century frescoes. Chiesa di San Bernardino da Siena 📍 Carpi · 12 km Patron church of Carpi, begun in 1604, with the reliquary bust of Saint Bernardino of Siena.