Esino Lario

Esino Lario sits at 910 metres in the Val d'Esino, below the northern Grigna. From Varenna's waterfront it is twelve kilometres of hairpins and about seven hundred metres of climb: in summer the air is cooler, and you see the lake from above.

The comune was formed in 1927 by joining Esino Superiore, with its church of Sant'Antonio Abate, and Esino Inferiore, with that of San Giovanni Battista. It is the only comune lying wholly within the Parco regionale della Grigna Settentrionale. The village has the parish church of San Vittore and the Museo delle Grigne, housed since 2016 in the park of Villa Clotilde.

Graves found at Esino show that Celtic peoples lived here between the ninth and first centuries BC. The grave goods include brooches, bracelets, pottery and weapons, and the warriors' swords were bent so that no one could use them again. The Romans left burials with fourth-century coins. In the thirteenth century Esino's church depended on the pieve of Varenna, and in 1455 it became a parish.

The village's woods supplied the charcoal that fed the iron furnaces of the Valsassina. From the 1850s the priest and geologist Antonio Stoppani studied the fossils of the Grigne, and at the end of the century the first summer visitors arrived. From the 1960s tourism became one of the village's main activities.

In 1936 the parish priest, Don Giovanni Battista Rocca, founded a tapestry school to give work to the village girls and keep them from leaving for the city. Esino tapestries had a warp of fine hemp and a weft of silk dyed on the spot. The school won awards at the Milan Triennale and closed in 1962. In 1947 Don Rocca also founded the Museo delle Grigne, which the engineer Pietro Pensa installed on the village square in 1959.

In June 2016 Esino hosted Wikimania, the world conference of the Wikimedia community: almost 1,400 people came from more than seventy countries. The Museo delle Grigne has a section on the event.

The parish church of San Vittore stands on a rocky spur among the firs, approached by a Way of the Cross whose bronze stations are by the sculptor Michele Vedani. The church was enlarged several times from 1520 onwards. Inside are Baroque carvings that tradition attributes to Giovanni Maglia, a craftsman from Esino, a gilded wooden lintel of 1654 and two tapestries from the village school. San Vittore is Esino's patron saint, celebrated on 8 May.

At Ortanella, nearly a thousand metres up above Varenna, the little Romanesque church of San Pietro, recorded in the thirteenth century, stands in a meadow beside the mule track between Esino and Lierna. The old road of the eastern shore ran this way, avoiding the cliffs that drop sheer into the lake between Mandello and Bellano.

Beyond the village the road climbs on to the Cainallo, at around 1,250 metres. From there the path leads to the huts and the northern Grigna: it is the shortest access from this side of the lake. Mountain boots are needed, because the Grigna's paths cross limestone with exposed stretches, and the weather at altitude can turn quickly. There are easier paths around the village too.

Much of the Grigne is made of a rock called Esino Limestone, formed in the Middle Triassic in a shallow tropical sea. The Moncodeno basin holds hundreds of caves, and some are more than a thousand metres deep. Here the Monza section of the Italian Alpine Club opened the Capanna Monza in 1906; destroyed in 1944, it was rebuilt after the war as the Rifugio Bogani.