Piuro

The name of Piuro, according to the tradition reported by the Grisons governor Guler von Wyneck, comes from the Latin plorare, to weep: it was the memory of a first catastrophe, the one that in the ninth century destroyed the old village of Belforte. The second came on 4 September 1618 — in the Grisons the date was written 25 August, because the Gregorian calendar had not been adopted there. A landslide broke away from Monte Conto and wiped the town out. The rescuers from Chiavenna, led by commissioner Fortunato Sprecher, could do nothing: he counted nine hundred dead, the historian Benedetto Parravicini twelve hundred. The few survivors founded Borgonuovo, and the disaster was still being written about a century and a half later, from Muratori to Kant.

Before that Piuro was rich. Its merchants were known all over Europe for silk, for wine and for the laveggi, the pots of soapstone quarried here; and tolls were collected on the traffic climbing towards the Septimer pass. Of that wealth the palazzo Vertemate Franchi is left, and little else. One oddity also remains: with the Val di Lei, Piuro is one of the few Italian comuni that lie beyond the Alpine watershed, with their water running off towards the Rhine.