Faggeto Lario

At Molina the medieval parish church was Santa Margherita, with a Romanesque bell tower of the late eleventh century. When the villagers moved further up, a more central church was built, dedicated to Saint Anthony Abbot: by 1619 it was already the parish church. In the seventeenth century this church, which had probably grown too small, was replaced by today's, finished in 1703 after several decades of work. At Lemna the dedication to Saint George may be a Lombard trace: today's church is sixteenth-century, on the site of an older one, and before that the parish was Sant'Alessandro, further down, whose bell tower was pulled down in 1928. San Giorgio has paintings attributed to Andrea Pozzo.

At Palanzo, Sant'Ambrogio was a chapel of the pieve of Nesso in the thirteenth century and was entirely rebuilt at the start of the seventeenth, because it could no longer hold the congregation. Outside the village, a quarter of an hour on foot, the church of the Madonna del Soldo, from the later sixteenth century, stands in a panoramic spot. Local stories tie it to Saint Charles Borromeo and the Blessed Bernardino Caimi, and the name probably comes from the toll paid when the war between Como and Milan forced merchants to pass this way.

A bull of Pope Alexander III dated 14 April 1162 lists Palanzo among the possessions of the Archbishop of Milan. In May 1240 Emperor Frederick II placed the village under the city of Como.

The churches of the three villages belonged to the pieve of Nesso; Lemna was already a parish of its own in 1593, when Bishop Feliciano Ninguarda of Como visited it. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries many people emigrated from Palanzo. In 1807 a decree of Napoleon joined Molina to Torno, and Lemna and Palanzo to Pognana; when the Austrians returned, the three villages became comuni of their own again. In 1953 a road open to vehicles was built up to Palanzo.

The castle of Palanzo dates from the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Stretches of its walls survive, reworked in the nineteenth century, together with the lower part of the tower. The castle belonged to the comune until 1865 and has been a national monument since 1912. The bell tower of Sant'Ambrogio was built partly with stones from the castle tower, and a shrine of the Madonna of the Rosary, dated 1646, is set into the castle walls.

In the centre of the village, in a rustic building owned by the comune, stands the wine press built in 1572. Its beam is a single chestnut trunk twelve metres long. Every year, on the second Sunday of October, the press works again for the Sagra del Torchio, run by the Associazione Amici del Torchio di Palanzo; tortelli di Palanzo and roast chestnuts are served in the square. At the start of September the same association opens the village's old cellars for a wine tasting, the Cantin Vèrt.

The boat calls at the pier on the shore, and not far away is the church of San Giuseppe, near the Orrido di Faggeto, the gorge. On the night of 16 to 17 October 1863 a landslide swept away several houses at Riva di Lemna and killed thirty-five people.

Higher up are the remains of the castle of Palanzo and its watchtower, two rock-cut tombs at Lemna, one of which, in the village centre, has become a fountain basin, and the Grotta Guglielmo, a cave for experienced cavers only. On the summit of the Palanzone, at 1436 metres, stands a chapel. The Strada Regia, the mule track that climbs the eastern shore from Brunate to Bellagio, still runs through Molina, Lemna and Palanzo.

From the mountain hamlets you climb to the Dorsale del Triangolo Lariano, the waymarked route that starts at Brunate and runs high above the lake. From Molina and Lemna paths reach the saddles named after them, on either side of the Bolettone; the Bocchetta di Molina is at 1116 metres. From Palanzo a dirt road climbs to the Bocchetta di Palanzo, at 1210 metres, where many paths meet. From there you carry on towards the Rifugio Riella and the summit of the Palanzone, with its pyramid-shaped chapel built in 1900.

From Palanzo the Way of the Cross, which already existed before 1748, leads to the church of the Madonna del Soldo. Another path drops from Palanzo to Canzaga, to the church of San Rocco at Pognana Lario, and the Strada Regia carries on north towards Pognana and Nesso and south towards Torno.