Dongo

On 27 April 1945 a German column retreating north was stopped by a checkpoint of the 52nd Garibaldi Brigade just beyond the village of Musso. After lengthy negotiations the Germans were allowed to continue, on condition that their lorries were searched in the square at Dongo. There, in the afternoon, the partisan Giuseppe Negri recognised Benito Mussolini, hiding in a lorry in the greatcoat and helmet of a German soldier. Mussolini was taken to the town hall in Palazzo Manzi, and in the evening to the Guardia di Finanza barracks at Germasino. The next day he was killed at Giulino di Mezzegra, and fifteen members of the Italian Social Republic were shot on the Dongo lakefront.

The Museum of the End of the War, on the ground floor of Palazzo Manzi, tells the story of the days from 25 to 28 April 1945 and of the Resistance on the lake in seven rooms, with objects, documents, testimony and period film.

Palazzo Manzi is the neoclassical building facing the lakefront square. The Polti Petazzi brothers had it built between 1803 and 1824, probably to a design by Carlo Polti. On the first floor, the piano nobile, is the Sala d'Oro: a double-height hall with stucco, gilding and a Parnassus painted on the vault by Giuseppe Lavelli. The same floor holds the historic library, which keeps its original furnishings, and the chapel of the Immacolata, whose altar of coloured marbles is by Carlo Vitali of Varenna.

The palazzo passed by inheritance to Giuseppina Manzi, who gave it to the Comune in 1937; it has been the town hall ever since. In April 1945 the Sala d'Oro served as the chapel of rest for the last partisans killed at Dongo, and a few days later the arrested Fascist leaders were locked in there. The museum on the ground floor opened in 1995 as the Museo della Resistenza Comasca and took its present name in 2014, after renovation.

Dongo lies at the mouth of the Albano stream, on the western shore of the upper lake. In Roman times the road up the lake towards Chiavenna, later called the Via Regina, ran through it. From the town the Albano valley climbs to the San Jorio pass, an old crossing into Switzerland. In the Middle Ages the fortified village grew around the core of Martinico, and Santo Stefano was the mother church of the pieve, the old parish district.

With Gravedona and Sorico, Dongo formed the Tre Pievi, the 'three parishes', which passed with Como to the Visconti of Milan in 1335. From 1512 the Tre Pievi were governed by the Grisons, who gave them up in 1526. In 1580 King Philip II of Spain sold the county of the Tre Pievi to Cardinal Tolomeo Gallio. The town's coat of arms bears three crosses in memory of the Tre Pievi.

Iron was mined in the valleys above Dongo from at least the fifteenth century. In the second half of the eighteenth century the Rubini family took over the mines, and around 1790 they built a charcoal-fired blast furnace. In 1833 the Rubini engaged the Alsatian Georges Henri Falck as a consultant, and in 1863 his son Enrico married Irene Rubini. After 1880 Giulio Rubini and his brother Aristide gave up the mines, dismantled the blast furnace and turned to rolling.

In 1906 the ironworks became part of the Acciaierie e Ferriere Lombarde, a company founded in Milan that year. Its managing director was Giorgio Enrico Falck, the son of Enrico and Irene, born in Dongo in 1866. The Dongo plant made iron castings, rolled sections and forgings. One part of the comune is called Villaggio Falck. Giulio Rubini, born in Dongo in 1844, served as Minister of the Treasury and of Public Works, and the town has a monument to him.

Santo Stefano, the church of the pieve, stands on the lakeshore at the end of an avenue of cypresses. It was rebuilt between 1716 and 1735 with a raised floor, because the lake often flooded the earlier church. The apses of the old church survive in the sacristy and in a side chapel. The chapels and the presbytery were frescoed in the eighteenth century by painters including Giulio Quaglio and Carlo Scotti, and the niches of the nave hold stucco statues by Stefano Salterio.

In Martinico, the oldest part of the town, the Romanesque church of Santa Maria dates from the eleventh and twelfth centuries and keeps frescoes of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The sanctuary of the Madonna delle Lacrime grew from devotion to an image of the Virgin, linked to the tradition of its weeping on 6 September 1553. Inside is the Last Supper carved in wood by Fra Diego Giurati. Above the town, near the Albano, stands the octagonal seventeenth-century church of San Gottardo.