Parco delle Orobie Valtellinesi

If you leave from the bottom of the valley in Valtellina and enter any valley of Orobie, you will have to face a narrow and inhospitable ravine but, once you reach a higher altitude, the landscape opens in a charming and less steep tableland.
This characteristic morphology depends on the way the so-called suspended valleys formed: they derive from the action of lateral glaciers which are less imposing than the main one which dug out Valtellina.

From the last houses in Piagno (country ward of Cosio Valtellino - Sondrio) an easy mule track leaves and leads, in short time and without difficulties, to the ruins of the small church of San Pietro in Vallate. The building, together with other buildings which no longer exist, was part of a small priorship of Benedictine Monks from Cluny. The monastery was founded in 1078 by a monk coming from Mantello, where a small friar community from San Colombano already existed.