CHERO
(89 METRES ABOVE SEA LEVEL – 5 KM FROM CARPANETO)
The name of the Village almost certainly derives from the DE CARIOs lineage that has governed the area without interruptions since 1250 until 1441.
The feud was later assigned by the Duke Filippo Maria Visconti (from the 22nd of December 1441) to Alberto Scotti from Carpaneto, as a reward for his vassalage and his loyalty.
The locality, by the time of the Roman supremacy, was famous for the passage of a road paved with leucite rock that conjoined Veleia’s “Municipium” with the Consular Emilia.
Even in the Middle Ages this exclusive tertiary function remained unaltered both as a transit street for the numerous pilgrims that, going to Rome, were forced to travel the Val Segola to insert to the Monastery, and as connector between the level and the Arda Valleys (Chiavenna and Chero).
When in 1815 Travazzano’s Town Hall was suppressed, it is told that the inhabitants had presented their candidacy to the succession since that Chero counted more than Carpaneto’s population.
Chero is characterised by the presence of a discreet residential area.
MONUMENT TO THE FALLEN
It was built in 1985 for an initiative organized by the inhabitants. Don Ferdinando Gobbi was the district’s parish priest and the one who guided the Committee.
The monument rises on an area across from the parish hall, not very far from the church. The work is composed by a squared base made of black stones. A marble gravestone only has a simple writing in bronze: “Chero to its Fallen”. On the top of the complex there’s a granite column over the which it’s located a statue of the Virgin Queen of Peace. The monument has been inaugurated the 8th December 1985.
PARISH CHURCH OF ST. BIAGIO
The current temple is dedicated to St. Biagio. It was built in 1736 over the foundations of a previous Oratory of 1152.
On the sober façade, with gable roof, stand out a big rose window and a gate with a frescoed lunette (with de Patron’s image).
The inside, a unique aisle with three magnificent chapels on the sides, maintains an antique slab in sandstone, walled in right in the pavement in front of the step of the major altar, and it has the heraldic emblem of the De Cario counts.
Of an antique Sacellum dated 1604 dedicated to the Carmelo’s Virgin it only has remained a parchment by 1757, now exposed in the sacristy, in which the Piacenza’s bishop of the time (PIETRO V CRISTIANI – 1478/1776) gave authority to the Parish Priest to apply, with therapeutic purposes, the scapular of the Virgin over the sick limbs of the invalids.
It is one of the Churches of the diocese attributed in the Jubilee’s oval medallion.
(Translated by Laura Fugazzi)