Lanzo d'Intelvi

Lanzo lies at 907 metres on the upland of the upper Val d'Intelvi, among beech woods and pasture, a few kilometres from the Swiss border. From the early twentieth century well-to-do Milanese families made it a summer resort. In 1907 a funicular opened, climbing here from Santa Margherita di Valsolda on Lake Lugano. It was about a kilometre and a half long, rose some six hundred metres and, together with the boat, linked the village to Lugano. It ran until 1977.

The villas of those years remain. Giuseppe Sommaruga designed Villa Poletti, built between 1913 and 1915 with wrought iron by Alessandro Mazzucotelli, and Villa Cirla, of 1915–1917; both are private. Villa Turconi, built between 1918 and 1923, looks like a stone manor house; it belongs to the comune and hosts exhibitions. Antonio Fogazzaro set part of his novel “Il mistero del poeta”, published in 1888, in Lanzo.

San Siro, the church of the patron saint, has a Romanesque bell tower from the early eleventh century with four two-light windows, each divided in two by a small column. In 1474 the Bishop of Como, Branda Castiglioni, made it a parish church, and from 1476 it was rebuilt; the work was finished in the sixteenth century. Inside are Lombard frescoes of the early sixteenth century, close to the style of Sigismondo De Magistris, with the four Doctors of the Church, the Last Supper and the Evangelists.

A few hundred metres away, the sanctuary of the Madonna di Loreto began in the second half of the sixteenth century as a copy of the Holy House of Loreto. Pietro Spazzi of Laino enlarged it in 1673, and the portico was frescoed by the school of Carlo Innocenzo Carloni. Every year, on the last Saturday of January, the statue of the Black Madonna is put on display, and on the Sunday the Alpini carry it in procession through the village.

For centuries the Val d'Intelvi sent its men to work far away. From 1157 the maestri antelami, builders from the valley, are recorded in Genoa. Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries the maestri intelvesi, architects, sculptors, stuccoists and painters, worked all over Europe. Craftsmen left too, shoemakers, tailors and carpenters, and many went to nearby Italian-speaking Switzerland.

Scaria, just below Lanzo, is the home village of the Carloni, or Carlone. Carlo Antonio Carlone, who was born here around 1635 and died in Passau in 1708, directed the Baroque rebuilding of the abbey of St Florian in Austria from 1686. Diego Francesco Carloni (1674–1750) worked on the stucco of Ludwigsburg Palace in Germany. His brother Carlo Innocenzo (1686–1775) painted in Ludwigsburg, Passau, Linz, Breslau, Prague and Vienna, where he frescoed the ceilings of the Upper Belvedere.

Scaria was a comune of its own until 1928, when it was joined to Lanzo. Between 1711 and 1753 the brothers Diego Francesco and Carlo Innocenzo Carloni remade the church of Santa Maria in their home village: Diego did the stucco and the statues, Carlo Innocenzo the frescoes and the altarpieces. On the pulpit of 1781 is a corncob, the Carloni emblem: in dialect a corncob is called a carlòn.

Next to the church, the Museo d'Arte Sacra della Valle Intelvi, founded in 1966, has a section devoted to Ercole Ferrata, the sculptor from Pellio who became one of Bernini's chief assistants in Rome. It also keeps the Paradisin, the display made in 1752 for the Forty Hours devotion. The church of Santi Nazaro e Celso, probably of eleventh-century Romanesque origin, preserves chancel frescoes of 1516 and nave frescoes of 1588; the Carloni brothers were buried in the cemetery beside it.

From Lanzo a six-kilometre road climbs to the Sighignola, at 1,302 metres. The road and the viewpoint were opened in 1913 on the initiative of the Touring Club Italiano. The terrace stands on the Swiss border and looks straight down on Lake Lugano. At the end of the 1960s work began on a cable car up from Campione d'Italia, which was never finished. A second terrace opened in 2012 where its top station stood.

Around the village there are easy paths through the woods and pastures. In winter the Sighignola road can be icy or closed by snow, so anyone driving up in those months checks first. At Ramponio, a few kilometres away, the sanctuary of San Pancrazio keeps the bell tower and apse of an eleventh-century Romanesque oratory.