Dervio

Dervio stands on the fan of debris that the Varrone, the torrent of the Valvarrone, has laid down where it meets the lake. Over the centuries that debris built a flat peninsula reaching a few hundred metres into the lake, with a sheltered bay on either side. The torrent splits the village in two, and the settlement grew from several cores: the Borgo, by the lake, around the parish church; Villa, near the old bridge over the Varrone; and Castello, higher up, around the Orezia tower.

The winds are those of the upper lake: the Tivano from the north in the morning, the Breva from the south from the afternoon on. On the peninsula, between the two bays, there are sailing and windsurfing clubs and schools. From the village the Valvarrone provincial road climbs to the Rifugio Roccoli Lorla, where the path up Monte Legnone begins; at 2,609 metres it is the highest summit in the province of Lecco.

On the Mai headland above the village stand the walls of Castelvedro, a late Roman fort that was part of the chain of signal posts along the lake. Dervio already appears in a will of 814, which leaves property to the oratory of San Quirico and names a church of San Pietro. In the Middle Ages Dervio was the centre of a pieve, a church district that took in Corenno, Dorio and the Valvarrone. In 1039 the village endured a long siege by the Tre Pievi, the league of Dongo, Gravedona and Sorico.

In the 1270s Ottone Visconti, Archbishop of Milan, gave Corenno as a fief to the Andreani. In the early fifteenth century, during the wars between Milan and Venice, the villagers bought a bombard to defend the Orezia tower. In 1480 the fief of the Riviera, which included Dervio, passed to Pietro Dal Verme. From the 1530s until 1788 it was held by the Sfondrati.

In the Borgo, near the lake, the parish church of Santi Pietro e Paolo is the mother church of the old pieve. It is Romanesque, of the eleventh century: the three-aisled plan and the shaft of the bell tower survive from that time. It was renewed in the seventeenth century, when two large canvases by Giovan Paolo and Francesco Cavagna were placed on either side of the chancel.

By the old bridge over the Varrone, the church of Santi Quirico e Giulitta has a Romanesque stone bell tower of around 1080. From here a mule track climbs in half an hour to the ruins of Castelvedro.

In the hamlet of Castello, the small church of San Leonardo is recorded in the late thirteenth century. It probably began as the chapel of the lords of the Orezia castle; in the seventeenth century it was given a stucco altar with the Madonna between Saints Leonard and Anthony of Padua. Close by, the fifteenth-century Orezia tower has been open to the public since 2016 and carries a statue of the Madonna on top.

Corenno Plinio, a hamlet of Dervio, is a fortified cluster of a few houses on a spur of rock just north of the village. The Andreani, lords of the fief, built its castle between 1363 and 1370. Against its walls stand the church of San Tommaso di Canterbury and the three tombs of the Andreani, Gothic marble monuments of the fourteenth century. From the square the scalotte, stairways partly cut into the rock, run down to the water.

Corenno was a comune of its own from the fifteenth century until 1927, when it became part of Dervio again. In the 1860s it added Plinio to its name, because by tradition Pliny the Younger had a villa here. The castle is private. Half an hour is enough to walk round the hamlet; from Dervio you reach it along the shore, by bike or in two minutes by car.

Until the mid-nineteenth century Dervio lived mainly on vineyards, olive groves, mulberry trees and a few cattle. Fishing for agone, the lake shad, went on into the twentieth century on a smaller scale. For centuries wool was worked here too, a trade promoted by the Umiliati of the monastery of San Clemente. In the twentieth century Redaelli, the steel firm founded in Lecco, had a works here; between 1941 and 1943 it built a new one to a design by the architect Enrico Agostino Griffini. The Lecco–Colico railway arrived in 1894. Dervio also has a Navigazione Laghi shipyard, where the ferries Adda and Lario were built.

The feast of the patron saints, Peter and Paul, falls on 29 June. On the last weekend of June the Sagra del Misultin serves dried agone with polenta. From 8 December to Epiphany the streets of Dervio and the nearby villages fill with nativity scenes.