Bellano

Bellano stands on the alluvial fan that the Pioverna torrent has built up where it enters the lake. The old centre, largely medieval in appearance, lies on the right bank. On the left bank is Coltogno, the newer part, with the station on the Lecco–Colico line, about half an hour by train from Lecco.

Behind the centre opens the Orrido, the gorge cut by the Pioverna, which you walk through on walkways fixed to the rock; the first were built in 1868. At the entrance stands the Ca' del Diavol, a three-storey pentagonal turret of uncertain origin, named after the frescoes of the devil on its top floor. Behind the apse of Santi Nazaro e Celso stands San Rocco, built in the late fifteenth century, beside a small Roman bridge over the gorge. The Sentiero del Viandante crosses the bridge and passes under the church's porch on its way to Varenna and Corenno Plinio.

In the Middle Ages Bellano was the seat of a pieve, the church district centred on Santi Nazaro e Celso. In the early twelfth century, in the Ten Years' War between Como and Milan, it sided with Milan, and from the late thirteenth century it passed to the Visconti. On 9 September 1341 a flood of the Pioverna partly destroyed the church, which was rebuilt in the mid-fourteenth century at the wish of Archbishop Giovanni Visconti. Its facade, banded in white and black, bears the coats of arms of the Visconti and the Torriani.

In 1480 the town joined Varenna and Mandello in the Contado della Riviera, a fief granted to Pietro Dal Verme. In 1531 the Medeghino, lord of Musso, had the walls pulled down, and from 1533 to 1788 the fief belonged to the Sfondrati. Since 1 January 2020 the municipality has also included Vendrogno and the Muggiasca, up to the summit of Monte Muggio at 1,799 metres.

For centuries the force of the Pioverna drove Bellano's machines. The works stood at the mouth of the Orrido, where the water drops in a natural fall, and received it through channels and tunnels. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries it powered ironworks, then came the silk mills: San Nicolao, the old church of the Umiliati, became a warehouse for the Gavazzi silk works.

In 1859 the Badoni family of Lecco set up a rolling mill at the foot of the Orrido. Eugenio Cantoni then leased the works and started a cotton spinning mill, which already had 8,600 spindles in 1868. The railway from Lecco arrived in 1892. In 1898, after a fire, the cotton mill was rebuilt, with a house for its workers known as the Convitto. With so many factories, Bellano was called “the little Manchester of the Lario”. Later the waters of the Pioverna were taken to a hydroelectric plant.

Sigismondo Boldoni, born in Bellano in 1597, was a physician and professor at the University of Pavia. In 1617 he published “Larius”, a short Latin poem about the lake. His letters on the descent of the Landsknechts and on the plague were also used by Alessandro Manzoni. The poet and novelist Tommaso Grossi, another native of Bellano, lived for fourteen years in Manzoni's house. His marble statue on the lakefront, by Antonio Tantardini, was unveiled in 1876 with an inscription signed by Manzoni.

Bartolomeo Nogara, born in Bellano in 1868, was director general of the Vatican Museums from 1920. During the Second World War he sheltered works of art from museums all over Italy there. The painter Giancarlo Vitali (1929–2018), the son of fishermen, often painted his home town, and many of his works are in the museum at Palazzo Lorla. The writer Andrea Vitali, born in Bellano in 1956, sets many of his novels here.

The Pesa Vegia has been held every 5 January, the eve of Epiphany, for more than four centuries. It recalls the edict with which, in the early seventeenth century, the Spanish governor of Milan, the Count of Fuentes, cancelled the new units of measurement and restored the old ones, the “pesa vegia”. In the evening the Governor arrives at the harbour, the edict is read from the balcony of the town hall, the procession of the Three Kings goes round the lanes and a bonfire is lit on the pier.

Around 17 January Vendrogno celebrates Saint Anthony the Abbot, with the blessing of salt and the auction of baskets. In late July Bellano marks the feast of its patron saints, Nazarius and Celsus, with services in the main church and festivities in Piazza Tommaso Grossi. Also in July, for one evening, agoni, a lake fish, are eaten in the street on Via Manzoni.