A house with four centuries on its shoulders

Let’s start with the facts, and there are plenty of them here. Casa Cassan is created by incorporating at least two buildings from the 15th–16th century period. It was first owned by the Quadrio Peranda family; then, from the end of the 18th century, it passed to the Gerosa-Foppoli-Cassan family. Who still lives there today.

Behind the façade there are courtyards, a rustic wing, cellars, and a park. Everything that you would never imagine from the street. And it’s already a surprise in itself: the “normal” house that hides a secret garden.

The roses that have a first name and a last name

But the heart of the Roseto is not the walls. It is the roses.

In the garden lovingly tended by Antonello Cassan, recent varieties and old roses coexist—arriving from other gardens and other stories. So far, a roseto like many others.

Then you find out that some of those roses bear the name of a real person. Loved people—or people, according to the owner’s account, who left such a strong mark that they deserved a rose all of their own.

And here is the detail that made me think: not all those people know that they have a rose with their name. They go around the world without realizing it.

There is also another part of the story, more delicate, that concerns a symbolic bond between people and roses: according to those who keep the garden, in coincidence with very negative events some roses would have suffered—or wouldn’t have made it. This should be said for what it is: a story, a reading of the Guardiano del Roseto. Not a phenomenon from a botany textbook.

The Water War

Let’s change the subject completely, because at Casa Cassan there’s also a story involving a shotgun.

For years, around the spring and the Valón, people fought what is remembered as a real “water war.” A neighbor tried to divert the water to his own plots of land. Carlin Gerosa, Antonello’s grandfather, who lived in that house, wasn’t the kind of person to let it slide: according to the tale that has been handed down, he arrived to reclaim the water armed with a shotgun.

He also had a large collection tank built, and today, in the garden, old stone conduits and several water points are still there. Concrete proof of a battle that was much less peaceful than a rose garden might suggest.

A message from 1897

During the restoration of the house, something happened that is the kind of thing that occurs once every hundred years. Literally.

Under the floor, a wine bottle and a letter turned up, left by the priest Giuseppe Foppoli. Dated 22 October 1897, the letter tells a small snapshot of the Ponte of that time: the price of wine, the population, the dairies. Tiny details, which when put together help recreate an ordinary day more than a hundred years ago.

A refrigerator before the refrigerator

In one of the frescoed rooms of the house there is a wall cabinet connected to a duct that brings fresh air up from the cellar. A natural refrigerator, built without electricity, that worked perfectly long before anyone invented the electric one.

Today, that same cabinet has become a bookshelf. The duct is still there, beneath the books.

The mystery that remains a mystery

And then there’s what we still don’t know for certain.

An ancient account tells of a possible underground passage between Casa Cassan and the building across the way, belonging to the Guicciardi of the Knights of Saint Stephen. No document confirms it with certainty. What remains is a “perhaps,” one of those stories that are passed down precisely because nobody has ever fully denied them.

Among the cellars, moreover, there are still a wine press and some special barrels, lined on the inside with glass, built on site by a Swiss company from Zollikon.

The backdrop that still awaits a photo

There’s also a painted wall that deserves a chapter of its own. In the early 1900s, a painter had his studio right inside Casa Cassan, and on that wall he painted a backdrop—a kind of stage setting from a bygone era—in front of which the families of the village would stand posing for photographs.

That backdrop is still there. And today, in front of that same wall, you can still take a photo: the same gesture as more than a hundred years ago.

We tell it in video too

The story of the Santa Casa di Tresivio is featured in the eighth episode of Tra Radici e Segreti, the video series that brings together the collaboration between Calendario Valtellinese and Waltella Vibes.

If you want to watch the reel again, you can find it on our YouTube profile

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What remains, in the end

Casa Cassan is many things all together: a family home, an archive of stories, a small distributed museum of everyday life in Valtellina. But the Roseto del Drago is what makes it unique: a garden where the roses are not just plants—they are memories with their roots.

If you walked past this house without knowing, now you do. And if one day you discover that you have a rose with your name somewhere in Valtellina, well, consider yourselves lucky.

What to do today at the Dragon Rose Garden

Today, Casa Cassan is also a holiday home. And those who choose it don’t come just to sleep.

You live inside this historic house as if it were your own: you can use the library, the one created from the old “refrigerator,” the living room with frescoes, the ancient kitchen. Not only the bedroom: all the rooms are available, with that freedom that usually isn’t found in a holiday home.

And it’s a place that truly invites you to slow down. Some people arrive for a weekend and end up not leaving again for an entire week: they stay in the garden to read, among the roses that bear the names of real people, within a silence that you can truly feel within these walls. No city noise, no rush.

For those who love greenery, spring is the right time: it’s when the rose garden is at the height of its bloom, with more than one hundred varieties coexisting in the same garden.

At the end of the day, Casa Cassan keeps doing what it has always done: preserving stories and people. Only today, for a few days, those people can be you.

You can find all the information on the dedicated page of Calendario Valtellinese