Griante

Cadenabbia is Griante's lakeside hamlet, facing Bellagio, and a landing for boats and ferries: from here the ferry crosses to Bellagio and Varenna. Along the lakefront stand the nineteenth-century villas and grand hotels, and just to the south the gardens of Villa Carlotta begin.

Beside the pier stands the Anglican Church of the Ascension, built for the English community that spent its stays here at the end of the nineteenth century: it was designed by the young architect Giuseppe Brentano, who died in 1889 before seeing it finished, and it was consecrated in 1891. It has a single nave with great transverse arches, a rose window on the facade, monochrome frescoes with angels and a marble pulpit.

The old centre keeps its narrow lanes and stone houses, traces of the medieval fortifications, an old wash house and the little church of San Rocco; from the terrace of the parish church of Santi Nabore e Felice you look out over the lake. The village also has the story of Giovanni del Matto, a pirate of the Lario who, betrayed by the Landsknechts, took refuge in the castle of Griante and was found and beheaded there.

From Cadenabbia an old cobbled stairway of 113 steps climbs to Calvonno, along the park of the Grand Hotel Cadenabbia and the northernmost part of the gardens of Villa Carlotta; at the top, a path shaded by old trees leads towards Villa La Collina. Higher up, from Carsolina, a walk of about forty minutes reaches the little church of San Martino, on a rock balcony at 475 metres.

Como's statutes of 1335 place Griante in the pieve of Menaggio and charge it with the upkeep of the Via Regina between the “de Carono” valley and the field of “Pozollo”. In the sixteenth century the old village was a cluster of buildings that could, when needed, form a fortified citadel. Most of these defences were lost in the wars between the French and the Spanish for control of the lake.

On 30 August 1647 the community bought itself free of feudal rule, and from then on paid a sum every fifteen years. In 1751 Griante had 245 inhabitants. Every year the general council elected the community's officers: the sindaco, two deputies, the consul and the clerk. Civil cases went to the podestà of Menaggio, criminal cases to the podestà of Como. In 1807 a Napoleonic decree joined Griante to Menaggio; after Napoleon's fall the comune was restored.

In “The Charterhouse of Parma” of 1839, Stendhal placed the castle of the del Dongo family, where the hero Fabrizio grows up, at “Grianta”. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote a poem called “Cadenabbia”. From 1889 to 1915 Achille Ratti, the future Pope Pius XI, spent his summer holidays in a house in the old village, which a plaque recalls.

Several villas along the Statale Regina are the work of the architect Giacomo Mantegazza. Villa Maria, built between 1889 and 1892, has three-arched loggias on two floors, decoration by Lodovico Pogliaghi and an iron-and-glass greenhouse in its park. Villa Bonaventura, of 1891, has a three-arched portico in front of the entrance that carries the balcony of the main floor. Villa Maresi, created between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by remodelling a sixteenth-century castle, has a crenellated boundary wall, turrets and a keep. The villas are private.

The climb to San Martino passes wayside shrines decorated with mosaics of the mysteries of the Rosary and, halfway up, the chapel of San Carlo, restored in 1977 in memory of fallen soldiers. The church has an eighteenth-century bell tower and a nineteenth-century portico. Inside, besides the wooden Madonna, are an inlaid altar of 1718 and a painting of Jacob's Ladder.

Just before the church, a waymarked path climbs to the left towards the Monti di Pilone, at about 800 metres, and on to the tip of the Sasso San Martino. From the tip you see the middle of the lake with the Grigne and the whole upper lake, with Menaggio in the foreground. The Cadorna Line, the defensive line built along the Swiss border during the First World War, ran through here: trenches and gun positions remain, and above the church there is a howitzer emplacement.