Rogolo

From mid-November to mid-February, at Rogolo, the sun does not arrive. It is a matter of geometry: the mountain stands exactly where the light would pass, and for three months the village lives in shadow. The consequence is known to everyone who lives there and is very concrete: even a small snowfall, or the usual frosts, stay on the ground until February, because there is nothing to melt them. For the houses at the foot of the mountain the sun begins to be seen again only in mid-March, and that, more than the calendar, is the moment when spring begins here. The rest of the year makes up for it: in summer it is hot and the temperature reaches thirty degrees, autumn brings wind and a cool air that soon turns cold.

The communal territory is a strip that starts on the valley floor of the lower Valtellina, at two hundred and five metres, and climbs the whole mountainside until it nearly touches two thousand five hundred: that is more than two thousand metres of altitude range inside a comune of a few hundred people, and since that strip reaches the ridge, Rogolo borders not only its neighbours down the valley but also, beyond the crest, comuni that look the other way. The village as we know it was born by someone else's decision: the Grisons created it in 1616, detaching it from Andalo Valtellino, with which until then it had been one single thing. Since then they have been two distinct comuni, next-door neighbours. Like the whole province of Sondrio, Rogolo too belongs to the diocese of Como; its arms and gonfalon were granted in 1986.