Abbadia Lariana

Around 1818 Pietro Monti, a silk throwster from the country south of Milan, turned an old fulling mill for woollen cloth, with its millrace and water wheel, into a mill where silk thread was twisted. In 1869 the works were enlarged with a filanda, where thread was reeled from the cocoons. Throwing stopped in the 1930s. The building then served as a depot for Moto Guzzi and, from 1940 to 1975, as an aluminium foundry.

The comune bought the buildings in 1978 and opened the Civico Museo Setificio Monti there on 10 May 1998. At its centre stands the great circular throwing machine of 1818: a wooden machine about eleven metres high, over four floors, five metres across and with 972 spindles. It was sold, dismantled and in 1965 taken to the Technorama in Winterthur, Switzerland. It has come back to Abbadia on loan, restored and in working order. Beside it are three rectangular throwing machines and the restored water wheel.

The village takes its name from the monastery of San Pietro, founded near the lake between 770 and 772 by the Lombard king Desiderius as a dependency of San Pietro in Ciel d'Oro in Pavia. In 833 the monastery passed to San Vincenzo in Prato in Milan. Exposed to the lake's floods, it was abandoned around the twelfth century, and in the thirteenth century the Servite friars rebuilt its church.

For centuries Abbadia belonged to the parish of Mandello, and only on 26 June 1495 did it get a parish of its own. From 1533 to 1788 it was a fief of the Sfondrati, together with the other villages of the Riviera. In 1788 the Servites handed their church over to the parish, which dedicated it to San Lorenzo; in 1915 Luigi Tagliaferri painted its vault and apse. The comune was called Abbadia until 1863 and then Abbadia sopra Adda. In 1928 it merged with Linzanico and took the name Abbadia Lariana.

Outside the village on the way in from Lecco, near the expressway junction, stands the Torraccia, a tower probably built in the twelfth century. It is about fourteen metres high, on a plan of roughly eight metres a side. An old photograph shows a wall linking it to the shore: the tower probably controlled the way north, both for defence and as a toll post. In the first half of the nineteenth century the new lakeside road brought down one of its corners, and in 1968 the ruin was consolidated.

The tower at Crebbio, in the old core of the hillside hamlet, is older: it was built between the second half of the tenth century and the first half of the eleventh. It is square, about five metres a side and some eleven metres high. In modern times it was lowered to take its timber gable roof.

Above the lakefront, the hamlets keep their old cores. Crebbio, on the hillside, is a village of medieval origin, with its tower and the church of Sant'Antonio Abate, remodelled in the seventeenth century. At Borbino the big wash-house in front of the little church of the Madonna della Neve was used for washing clothes until the 1960s. The church of San Rocco was built as a vow by the villagers who survived the cholera of 1836, and blessed in 1856.

In mid-January Crebbio keeps the feast of its patron, Sant'Antonio Abate. It lasts several days, with suppers of polenta oncia, made with butter and cheese; on the Sunday come the blessing of the animals and the basket auction. In February, for Sant'Apollonia, the stalls of the fair fill the whole lakefront. Abbadia's own patronal feast, San Lorenzo, falls on 10 August.

Abbadia is the traditional starting point for the stretch to Colico, about 45 kilometres divided into four stages. The first reaches Lierna: you walk along the slope with the lake below and the Grigne behind, and descend to the station at the end of the day. Stations along the eastern shore allow you to organise the outward and return journeys by train. The full Sentiero del Viandante extends from Lecco to Sorico for about 60 kilometres.

From Linzanico a short walk on mule tracks climbs the Val Monastero to the Cenghen waterfall, where the Zerbo stream drops more than fifty metres through a cleft in the rock. Up the same valley a path climbs to the Piani Resinelli, at about 1,300 metres, under the Grigna Meridionale. There the walkway of the Parco Valentino juts out over the drop above Lecco.