Lierna

Riva Bianca is Lierna's beach: a crescent of pale pebbles, public and partly serviced, where the water deepens gradually. The lake itself is deep, though, and Alpine: even in August the temperature drops quickly below two metres, and lifeguards are not on duty everywhere.

To the north the beach is closed off by a small peninsula, where the castle walls were built in the first quarter of the twelfth century. Their remains are built into the houses of the Castello hamlet, a small medieval cluster of houses packed together, with covered lanes, which you cross in ten minutes. At the entrance to the hamlet stands the Romanesque church of Santi Maurizio e Lazzaro, which in 1147 belonged to the Milanese monastery of San Dionigi. The two saints are painted as warriors on its front, and fragments of fifteenth-century frescoes survive inside.

Lierna was already inhabited in Roman times: in 1876 a black-and-white floor mosaic of the first century AD was found here, and it is kept in the archaeological museum of Lecco. In 1045 Aribert, Archbishop of Milan, left the court of Lierna to the Milanese monastery of San Dionigi. The monks held it until 1202, when the villagers bought it back.

During the Ten Years' War between Milan and Como, in 1124, ships from Como started a fire that destroyed part of the castle and its walls. From the sixteenth to the eighteenth century Lierna answered to the podestà of Mandello. In the eighteenth century it was a fief of the Sfondrati, counts of the Riviera, and in 1730 a court ruling separated it from the community of Mandello.

The station opened in 1892, on the new railway between Lecco and Bellano. In the 1920s there was a great deal of building in Lierna: villas such as Villa Aurelia, on Via Roma, which is private, date from that time.

In the centre of the village, on a rise, stands the parish church of Sant'Ambrogio. Its Romanesque bell tower dates from the first half of the eleventh century. The church was rebuilt in 1626–27 and enlarged between 1778 and 1785. Inside are Gian Battista Macolino's Rosary canvas of 1628 and a painting of Saint Anthony by an unknown artist. Beside it begins the Way of the Cross: fourteen chapels painted in 1879 by Luigi Tagliaferri.

The Milanese sculptor Giannino Castiglioni, who made the Lecco war memorial, kept a lakeside studio at Lierna from 1927 to 1971, and died here in 1971. Many of his works remain in the village: the layout of the cemetery, of 1922, several funerary chapels and the fountain in Piazza IV Novembre, of 1929. The church of Santi Maurizio e Lazzaro, at Castello, was also restored to his design. Since 2015 a museum spread through the village has shown his restored plaster models in the town hall and the Casa delle Associazioni.

Lierna has about 2,200 inhabitants, spread over ten hamlets between the shore and the slope. Villa is the centre, with the town hall and the parish church. Castello lies on the lake. Higher up are clusters such as Genico, Mugiasco, Olcianico and Sornico. Every year at the start of June the cellars of Mugiasco and Sornico open for tastings.

The Sentiero del Viandante passes above the village. Southwards it leads to Mandello and Abbadia Lariana. Northwards it reaches Varenna in about three and a half hours' walking, with the lake below and the Grigna behind. The station lets you start and finish by train.