Chiavenna

Chiavenna is the administrative and cultural centre of the Valchiavenna, at the foot of the Splügen Pass. The town arose on a large ancient landslide, and the boulders that fell across the slope left behind the air pockets and rock crevices that became its defining feature: a crotto is a domed cellar built over one of these cracks, called a sorèl, and Valchiavenna counts about eighty of them, mostly in private hands. The old town sits along the Mera, its stone streets carrying palazzi from the era when the town lived off the trade crossing the Alps, with stretches of foundation going back to Roman work below them.

The church and its font and treasury stand within this same fabric, one more layer laid over the Roman crossroads the town took its name from. The result is a town built twice over by the same geology and the same geography: the rock that cracked open to store food and wine is the same rock the streets and trade route were cut through, so the town's food culture and its position on the pass turn out to be two expressions of one fact of the ground it sits on.