Postalesio

A little above the built-up area stand the earth pyramids, and to understand what they are you have to look at them from the top down, that is, starting from the stone. On each column sits a boulder, and that boulder is the reason the column exists: rain and wind carried away the surrounding soil for centuries, but what lay beneath the stone stayed sheltered and was not eroded. The result, after a few hundred years, is tall columns of earth and gravel with a rock on top, each of them measuring exactly how much ground has gone from the slope. Similar phenomena can be seen at Zone, on Lake Iseo, and at Segonzano, in Trentino; here they stand just outside a village of a few hundred people, in the Valtellina, on the side that looks towards the Adda.

Of the village's history, on the other hand, the sources say nothing at all: the entry has empty sections. What remain, though, are three churches from three different centuries. San Colombano is of the eleventh century, and on its side walls it keeps frescoes from the beginning of the twelfth; at the base of the apse, of the same date, a velarium is painted with the cycle of the months, that is, a calendar in pictures. San Martino, in the district of the same name, is of the thirteenth. The bell tower of Sant'Antonio Abate is instead of 1774, and was designed by Girolamo Galletti of San Fedele Intelvi. Among the houses there is also Ca' Moroni. A small village with two ways of telling time, in short: the one painted month by month in an apse, and the one counted in centimetres of erosion by the columns up above.