Saltrio

For nearly a century the parish of Saltrio was a vicariate of itself. Since the Middle Ages the village had belonged to the diocese of Como, within the pieve of Riva San Vitale; in 1516 all the rest of that pieve passed to the Swiss, and when in 1884 the Swiss government nationalised religious institutions and the diocese of Lugano was created, Saltrio found itself cut off from its own diocese and without a provost to refer to: a unique case in Lombardy. To make good the gap it was declared a rural vicariate of itself, and the matter was closed only in 1982, when archbishop Carlo Maria Martini changed the parish's diocese and brought it into line with the Italian ones around it.

The name comes from the Latin saltus, wood, but the fortune of the village has been stone: Saltrio stone faces the Roman walls of Milan and recurs in the finer buildings of Canton Ticino and northern Italy, and between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries this was a land of stonecutters and sculptors. In a nearby quarry, in 1996, the remains of a large predatory dinosaur were found, named Saltriovenator, the hunter of Saltrio. The municipality lost its autonomy from 1928 to 1953, merged into Viggiù. Three thousand and thirteen inhabitants.