Peccia is one of six small Swiss

Switzerland

Switzerland name of one of the Swiss cantons. ; ; ; or ), in its full name the Swiss Confederation , is a federal republic consisting of 26 cantons, with Bern as the seat of the federal authorities. The country is situated in Western Europe,Or Central Europe depending on the definition....

 municipalities which merged in April 2004 to form the commune of Lavizzara

Lavizzara

Lavizzara is a municipality in the district of Vallemaggia in the canton of Ticino in Switzerland.The municipality was created in 2004 by a merger of Broglio, Brontallo, Fusio, Menzonio, Peccia and Prato-Sornico.-History:...

, with about 1000 people. The other municipalities were Broglio

Broglio, Switzerland

Broglio is a village and former municipality in the district of Vallemaggia in the canton of Ticino, Switzerland.In 2004 the municipality was merged with the other, neighboring municipalities Brontallo, Fusio, Menzonio, Peccia and Prato-Sornico to form a new and larger municipality...

, Brontallo

Brontallo

Brontallo is a village and former municipality in the district of Vallemaggia in the canton of Ticino, Switzerland.In 2004 the municipality was merged with the other, neighboring municipalities Broglio, Fusio, Menzonio, Peccia and Prato-Sornico to form a new and larger municipality...

, Fusio

Fusio

Fusio is a village and former municipality in the district of Vallemaggia in the canton of Ticino, Switzerland.In 2004 the municipality was merged with the other, neighboring municipalities Broglio, Brontallo, Menzonio, Peccia and Prato-Sornico to form a new and larger municipality...

, Menzonio

Menzonio

Menzonio is a village and former municipality in the district of Vallemaggia in the canton of Ticino, Switzerland.In 2004 the municipality was merged with the other, neighboring municipalities Broglio, Brontallo, Fusio, Peccia and Prato-Sornico to form a new and larger municipality...

, and Prato-Sornico

Prato-Sornico

Prato-Sornico is a former municipality in the district of Vallemaggia in the canton of Ticino, Switzerland.The municipality contained the villages Prato and Sornico...

.

History

Peccia is first mentioned in 1374 as Petia.

Peccia, together with Broglio, Fusio, Prato and Sornico were part of the comunità or valley community of Lavizzara until 1374. When the valley community broke up into separate villages, Peccia was the largest in the Lavizzara region. It included the settlement of Mogno and the Valle di Peccia, which was independent until 1669. The common, shared land

The commons

The commons is terminology referring to resources that are owned in common or shared between or among communities populations. These resources are said to be "held in common" and can include everything from natural resources and common land to software. The commons contains public property and...

 of the four communities of Fusio, Peccia, Prato and Sornico (known as the comunella dei quattro comuni) remained shared until 1929.

The village was part of the parish

Parish

A parish is a territorial unit historically under the pastoral care and clerical jurisdiction of one parish priest, who might be assisted in his pastoral duties by a curate or curates - also priests but not the parish priest - from a more or less central parish church with its associated organization...

 of Sornico until 1613, after which the church of S. Antonio Abate in Peccia was elevated to become a parish church

Parish church

A parish church , in Christianity, is the church which acts as the religious centre of a parish, the basic administrative unit of episcopal churches....

. The church was built in the 16th Century. After the floods of 1834 and 1868, which destroyed some of the village, the church was totally rebuilt. The valley church of S. Carlo was built in 1617, and was raised to be the parish church in 1669.

At the beginning of the 20th Century most of the jobs in the village were in the extraction, processing (vessels and stone ovens) and trade in soapstone

Soapstone

Soapstone is a metamorphic rock, a talc-schist. It is largely composed of the mineral talc and is thus rich in magnesium. It is produced by dynamothermal metamorphism and metasomatism, which occurs in the areas where tectonic plates are subducted, changing rocks by heat and pressure, with influx...

. Since 1946, white marble

Marble

Marble is a metamorphic rock composed of recrystallized carbonate minerals, most commonly calcite or dolomite.Geologists use the term "marble" to refer to metamorphosed limestone; however stonemasons use the term more broadly to encompass unmetamorphosed limestone.Marble is commonly used for...

 is also mined, which is the only marble quarry in Switzerland. In 1984, the presence of marble led to the creation of a sculpting school. This marble was used when the church of Mogno (a hamlet of Fusio) was rebuilt by Mario Botta

Mario Botta

Mario Botta is a Swiss architect. He studied at the Liceo Artistico in Milan and the IUAV in Venice. His ideas were influenced by Le Corbusier, Carlo Scarpa, Louis Kahn. He opened his own practice in 1970 in Lugano.-Career:...

, after the old church was destroyed by an avalanche in 1986.

At the beginning of the 21st Century, manufacturing provides more than a third of the jobs in village. In 1950-56 largest hydroelectric power plants in Switzerland was built in the Valle di Peccia. It is fed by water from the catchment area of the Maggia river. In the last decades of the 20th Century the village invested in its tourist infrastructure.

Geography

Peccia has an area, , of 54.26 square kilometres (20.9 sq mi). Of this area, 0.39 km² (0.150579841851089 sq mi) or 0.7% is used for agricultural purposes, while 14.5 km² (5.6 sq mi) or 26.7% is forested. Of the rest of the land, 0.48 km² (0.185329036124417 sq mi) or 0.9% is settled (buildings or roads), 0.94 km² (0.362936029076983 sq mi) or 1.7% is either rivers or lakes and 28.46 km² (11 sq mi) or 52.5% is unproductive land.

Of the built up area, housing and buildings made up 0.2% and transportation infrastructure made up 0.3%. Out of the forested land, 16.8% of the total land area is heavily forested and 4.8% is covered with orchards or small clusters of trees. Of the agricultural land, 0.5% is used for growing crops. All the water in the municipality is flowing water. Of the unproductive areas, 21.0% is unproductive vegetation and 31.5% is too rocky for vegetation.

The village is located in the Vallemaggia district, about 39 km (24.2 mi) from Locarno

Locarno

Locarno is the capital of the Locarno district, located on the northern tip of Lake Maggiore in the Swiss canton of Ticino, close to Ascona at the foot of the Alps. It has a population of about 15,000...

. It consists of several settlements scattered throughout the Peccia valley. The main village is located at an elevation of 840 m (2,755.9 ft) in the Valle Maggia

Valle Maggia

Valle Maggia is an alpine valley of the Maggia River in Ticino, the Italian canton of Switzerland.The valley is dotted with small picturesque villages with traditional stone houses, vineyards and dairy farms...

.

Coat of arms

The blazon

Blazon

In heraldry and heraldic vexillology, a blazon is a formal description of a coat of arms, flag or similar emblem, from which the reader can reconstruct the appropriate image...

 of the municipal coat of arms

Coat of arms

A coat of arms is a unique heraldic design on a shield or escutcheon or on a surcoat or tabard used to cover and protect armour and to identify the wearer. Thus the term is often stated as "coat-armour", because it was anciently displayed on the front of a coat of cloth...

 is Argent a fir tree issuant from a mount vert.

Demographics

Peccia has a population of 171.

Most of the population speaks Italian language

Italian language

Italian is a Romance language spoken mainly in Europe: Italy, Switzerland, San Marino, Vatican City, by minorities in Malta, Monaco, Croatia, Slovenia, France, Libya, Eritrea, and Somalia, and by immigrant communities in the Americas and Australia...

 (161 or 94.2%), with German

German language

German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....

 being second most common (5 or 2.9%) and Portuguese

Portuguese language

Portuguese is a Romance language that arose in the medieval Kingdom of Galicia, nowadays Galicia and Northern Portugal. The southern part of the Kingdom of Galicia became independent as the County of Portugal in 1095...

 being third (3 or 1.8%). There are 2 people who speak French

French language

French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...

 and people who speak Romansh.

Of the population in the village, 104 or about 60.8% were born in Peccia and lived there in 2000. There were 38 or 22.2% who were born in the same canton, while 8 or 4.7% were born somewhere else in Switzerland, and 21 or 12.3% were born outside of Switzerland. , there were 62 people who were single and never married in the village. There were 84 married individuals, 14 widows or widowers and 11 individuals who are divorced.

There were 12 households that consist of only one person and 7 households with five or more people. Out of a total of 65 households that answered this question, 18.5% were households made up of just one person and 4 were adults who lived with their parents. Of the rest of the households, there are 16 married couples without children, 22 married couples with children There were 6 single parents with a child or children. There were 4 households that were made up unrelated people and 1 household that was made some sort of institution or another collective housing.

there were 144 single family homes (or 91.7% of the total) out of a total of 157 inhabited buildings. There were 4 multi-family buildings (2.5%), along with multi-purpose buildings that were mostly used for housing (0.0%) and 9 other use buildings (commercial or industrial) that also had some housing (5.7%). Of the single family homes 8 were built before 1919, while 4 were built between 1990 and 2000. The greatest number of single family homes (93) were built between 1919 and 1945.

there were 162 apartments in the village. The most common apartment size was 4 rooms of which there were 46. There were 10 single room apartments and 60 apartments with five or more rooms. Of these apartments, a total of 63 apartments (38.9% of the total) were permanently occupied, while 97 apartments (59.9%) were seasonally occupied and 2 apartments (1.2%) were empty.

The historical population is given in the following chart:

Economy

There were 64 residents of the village who were employed in some capacity, of which females made up 23.4% of the workforce. , there were 26 workers who commuted into the village and 30 workers who commuted away. The village is a net exporter of workers, with about 1.2 workers leaving the village for every one entering.

Religion

From the , 159 or 93.0% were Roman Catholic, while 2 or 1.2% belonged to the Swiss Reformed Church

Swiss Reformed Church

The Reformed branch of Protestantism in Switzerland was started in Zürich by Huldrych Zwingli and spread within a few years to Basel , Bern , St...

. Of the rest of the population, there were 3 individuals (or about 1.75% of the population) who belonged to the Christian Catholic Church

Christian Catholic Church of Switzerland

The Christian Catholic Church of Switzerland is the Swiss member church of the Union of Utrecht, also known as Old Catholic Church, originally founded by the jansenists, with a later influx of discontented Catholics following their disappointment with the First Vatican Council. It has 14,000...

. There were 2 (or about 1.17% of the population) who belonged to no church, are agnostic

Agnosticism

Agnosticism is the view that the truth value of certain claims—especially claims about the existence or non-existence of any deity, but also other religious and metaphysical claims—is unknown or unknowable....

 or atheist

Atheism

Atheism is, in a broad sense, the rejection of belief in the existence of deities. In a narrower sense, atheism is specifically the position that there are no deities...

, and 5 individuals (or about 2.92% of the population) did not answer the question.

Education

In Peccia about 71 or (41.5%) of the population have completed non-mandatory upper secondary education, and 7 or (4.1%) have completed additional higher education (either University or a Fachhochschule

Fachhochschule

A Fachhochschule or University of Applied Sciences is a German type of tertiary education institution, sometimes specialized in certain topical areas . Fachhochschulen were founded in Germany and later adopted by Austria, Liechtenstein, Switzerland and Greece...

). Of the 7 who completed tertiary schooling, 71.4% were Swiss men, 28.6% were Swiss women.

, there were 10 students in Peccia who came from another village, while 17 residents attended schools outside the village.

External links

• Comune Peccia, official site in Italian
  Italian language
  Italian is a Romance language spoken mainly in Europe: Italy, Switzerland, San Marino, Vatican City, by minorities in Malta, Monaco, Croatia, Slovenia, France, Libya, Eritrea, and Somalia, and by immigrant communities in the Americas and Australia...
  
  .
• Sculpting School, official site in Italian
  Italian language
  Italian is a Romance language spoken mainly in Europe: Italy, Switzerland, San Marino, Vatican City, by minorities in Malta, Monaco, Croatia, Slovenia, France, Libya, Eritrea, and Somalia, and by immigrant communities in the Americas and Australia...
  
  , German
  German language
  German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
  
  , and English
  English language
  English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
  
  .