On the morning of Thursday 24th May 1646 in Piuro, Margherita Tognona accused of being a witch, was sentenced to banishment. The local secular court had scraped together "important" evidence but failed to obtain a full confession from her even after two periods of detention and extensive torture.
Margherita resisted, remaining unmoved by the physical and psychological humiliation of imprisonment, of the absence and indeed indifference of her own family, of the cold and hunger. This saved her life. She was taken as far as the Riva beyond the dominion of the Tre Leghe, and the Spanish authorities were informed of the presence of a witch on their territory. Margherita is alone now, deprived of everything, hunted down by the surrounding community in which she had grown up, by a society that has elevated superstition to the status of law. Nothing more would be heard of Margherita. Perhaps she, a strong woman indeed, had the chance to forge herself a second existence, declaring herself, as she would, to be innocent.
This was clearly not true for many other women in that century, along with a few men, where victims of summary trials and confessions extracted under torture or deprivation would bring the accused to the verge of madness. Many accepted death at the stake to a life with no possibility of rehabilitation. In Bregaglia itself, daughters, wives, mothers were torn from their ordinary lives for an alleged curse, a word too many, an inauspicious glance or quite simply hidden jealousy or a desire to obtain material effects seized from an alleged witch. Bad feelings and episodes prevalent in small, suspicious local communities of the time would resurface even more during periods of abject poverty or widespread anxiety, such as famines or plagues, often identifying in the figure of the witch the origin of such evils.
The Consorzio Turistico Valchiavenna offers visitors a tour combining nature and culture taking in a large part of the territory covering the 5 km separating Santa Croce di Piuro from the piazza San Pietro in Chiavenna, uniting the two places of imprisonment and witch trials of the era. We take the bus to Santa Croce from Chiavenna and appreciate the outside of the Cà della Giustizia, where the witchcraft trials of Piuro took place; the impressive communal wine press nearby and the round church of Santa Croce. Crossing the splendid 16th century bridge we reach the Romanesque church of San Martino ad Aurogo breaking our tour for tales of events of long ago, before reaching the Scilano plain courtesy of a well-preserved stretch of the centuries-old cobblestone mule-track, the very same that transported the alleged witches to the place of imprisonment and torture. From Scilano the route adopts the cycle/pedestrian path. The shady wooded slope is the ideal spot to appreciate tales of local sabbaths recorded in the interrogations, following that Alpine custom in which the sites were identified by the local communities by use of stone or wood of the stria.
After taking in further impressive reminders of the 17th century - the church of the Assunta and the old Hospital at Prosto - we return to Chiavenna to the old prison cells of the Palazzo Pretorio, midst the elegant coats of arms of the Grigioni Commissioners. The nearby convent of the Augustinian nuns, again 17th century, is an example of women choosing an ascetic existence, quite the antithesis to the salacious and vile conduct attributed to the women led to the stake. As often happens, the story goes beyond the imaginable in documenting murky, tangled, bloody and dramatic goings-on; events characterised by the phenomenon of witch hunts from the late Middle Ages to the modern age which have also left their mark in Valchiavenna, as a journey on our rather particular tour will reveal.
