Talamona

At Talamona the land was divided to the point of absurdity. Every father left to all his children, daughters included, a share of what he had: the fields, the woods, but also the rooms of the house, the furniture, the clothes. The result was that meadows and plots were split up until they lost their value, and that several families lived in the same house, some of them owning half a room. A source of the time notes that, when ploughing, it was not unusual to have to turn the oxen in the neighbour's field, because there was not enough room in one's own.

What divided those plots were the muracche, the dry-stone walls made with the stones the torrents bring down, which told everyone where one property ended and the next began. The people of Talamona cared about another separation as well: they prided themselves on never having had a single Protestant among them, and the old statutes forbade selling grain to the inhabitants of the Rhaetian side of the valley, who had been the last to convert to Christianity. The village, alone in the Valtellina, grew on the tip of an alluvial fan instead of at its foot.