Dorio

In Roman times the Via Spluga, the road from Milan over the Alps by the Splügen Pass, ran through Dorio. Dorio appears in the records in 1040, when it depended on Bellano together with Corenno and Dervio. In those years the ships of the Tre Pievi took the village by surprise, then Corenno and, after a long siege, Dervio. In 1449 troops from Como sacked Bellano, Dervio, Corenno and Dorio.

In the fifteenth century Dorio became independent of Dervio, and in 1480 the Riviera, Dorio included, was given as a fief to Pietro Dal Verme. On 26 May 1506 the Curia of Milan made the village a parish: the paths to Dervio were so difficult, above all in the long winter rains, that many newborns died unbaptised. Dervio's clergy nevertheless kept their right to a tithe on grapes and grain until the twentieth century. From 1533 to 1788 the fief belonged to the Sfondrati.

In the Middle Ages the village stood higher up, at Mandonico, a cluster perched between the Valle di Dorio and the Valle dei Mulini, built to escape invasions and raids. There, on a grassy clearing, is the old parish church of San Giorgio, built in the fourteenth century and remade several times, with the frescoes of 1492 telling the saint's deeds. Little by little families moved down to the locality of Solmogno, closer to the lake, which took the name of Dorio between 1640 and 1670. Earlier, in 1629, the Landsknechts had brought the plague, and the population had fallen from about three hundred to eighty-four.

The bond with Mandonico stayed strong: the new parish church, built in 1676 in the centre of the village and dedicated to the Blessed Virgin, was in 1787, when the old church became unsafe, dedicated to Saint George as well. Higher up, at 484 metres, the frescoed oratory of San Rocco recalls the vow of the villagers who survived the cholera of 1856.

On the shore a beach, wild in places, runs for a kilometre from the Corenno boundary to the Rivetta locality to the north. It can be walked end to end, and when the Breva blows, sailors, windsurfers and kitesurfers come. Between 1840 and 1842 a large silk-throwing mill with its reeling mill was built in the village. Dorio also has a station on the Lecco–Colico railway.

Paths and old mule tracks link the hamlets, and the Sentiero del Viandante, the mid-slope route between Abbadia Lariana and Colico, passes here among chestnut woods. In 1755 Dorio gained the localities of Sparesée, Perdonasco and Rainelda at the end of a dispute with Colico that lasted more than two centuries; it was twice joined to Dervio, from 1809 to 1816 and from 1927 to 1950.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Paolo Giovio and Sigismondo Boldoni described Dorio as a village rich in vineyards. At the end of the nineteenth century its land, almost all woods, chestnut groves and pastures, yielded chestnuts, timber, hay, wine, maize, silk cocoons and dairy produce, but not enough for the village. Many villagers went to work in the nearby villages or emigrated to Switzerland as masons.

The silk-throwing mill built by the Bettega brothers, with its reeling mill, employed many women workers from Dorio and the villages around, and the village also had a boatyard and a grain mill. In 1894 Dorio's station opened, on the new stretch of railway between Bellano and Colico.

In the centre of the village the parish church of San Giorgio was enlarged in 1712, then pulled down and rebuilt in 1859; an inscription on the façade records the restoration of 1974.

On 23 April the village celebrates its patron saint, George, to whom both the parish church and the old church at Mandonico are dedicated. Every 16 August the villagers climb to San Rocco to renew the vow of 1856. From 8 December to 6 January Dorio joins Dervio, Valvarrone and Sueglio in “Un presepi per ogni purtun”, the trail of nativity scenes set up in the villages' streets.