Sernio

Along the main road of Sernio there is a church that stands rather on its own: San Gottardo, named in a document of 1332. It is thought to have belonged to a settlement destroyed by water, and to have stayed where it was after the village had gone. The rest of Sernio gathered higher up, under a wide slope of orchards, in quarters that each have their own name — Valchiosa, Di Sotto, Piazza, Biolo — and that are held up by terracing. The parish church is dedicated to Saints Cosmas and Damian, physicians and martyrs: it was consecrated in 1477 and rebuilt in the seventeenth century. From the same period are the oratory of the Madonna della Neve and the front of Palazzo Omodei, the family that left the largest mark in the village; of the castle, on the other hand, only a few remains are left.

The slope is the real trade of the place. Sernio lies on the Rhaetian side of the Valtellina, just above Tirano, and its orchards give the Valtellina apples, grown here on terraces held up by dry-stone walls: a landscape that has to be remade every year, because the walls give way and the trees grow old. The feast falls on the twenty-seventh of September, the day of the two patrons, and the inhabitants are called serenaschi, not sernesi. The comune has two hamlets, Biolo and Valchiosa, and borders Tirano, Lovero, Vervio and, beyond the ridge, the Val Camonica.