Piateda

In 1986 two churches of Piateda ceased together to be parish churches: Sant'Antonio Abate, up the mountain, begun in 1589 on older structures, and San Gregorio Magno at Ambria, in the Val Venina, of 1615. They were merged into the parish on the valley floor, the Santissimo Crocifisso, which had been built in the nineteen-thirties after the land reclamation, when the village had moved downhill. It is the history of half the Lombard mountains told through a single year: the people go down, and the churches stay up.

Some survive on one feast a year: San Gregorio opens for the Madonna della Neve, the second Sunday in August; Sant'Agostino at Agneda for the first of August and for Saint Agatha in February; San Rocco at Bessega on 16 August. Others have not made it: San Bartolomeo in the Val Venina, Santa Croce in Valbona reduced to ruins, and San Vittore, the most unsafe of all — from which comes the canvas of Saint Victor painted in 1739 by Pietro Ligari, carried down to the valley and hung in the new parish church. At Agneda, instead, the altarpiece is of 1597 and is by Cipriano Valorsa, the painter from Grosio who left pictures across half the Valtellina.