Cuvio

Cuvio gave its name to the whole valley, the Valcuvia, but with its own boundaries it has never had any peace. In 1809 it took in seven neighbouring comuni at one go, and a few years later had to give almost all of them back; in 1928 it absorbed four more, and between 1954 and 1961 it lost them again one at a time, until Cavona, Cuveglio in Valle and Vergobbio went off to form the comune of Cuveglio. In the end, out of all that movement, what it kept was the name of the valley.

On the coat of arms, of 1985, there is a pun: the white tunic, which in old Italian is called a cotta, stands for the Cotta family, who held the whole Valcuvia in fief from 1450; the serpent stands for the Visconti who came after, and a mulberry plant for the village's main crop. The Palazzo Litta Visconti di Arese, which belonged to Pietro Cotta, counsellor to duke Francesco I Sforza, is medieval below and lordly above: it keeps the quadrilateral plan with inner courtyard of the fortification it grew out of. And here Piero Chiara set a novel, Il pretore di Cuvio.