Magreglio

The sanctuary of the Madonna del Ghisallo stands on the pass, at 754 metres, less than a kilometre from the village. The church was built in 1623 in place of an older one, whose bell tower survives; the three-arched portico was added in 1681.

In 1947 the parish priest of Magreglio, Don Ermelindo Viganò, asked for the Madonna del Ghisallo to be made patron of cyclists, and in 1949 Pius XII proclaimed her so. A bronze torch blessed by the Pope reached the sanctuary with a relay of cyclists; the last to carry it were Fausto Coppi and Gino Bartali.

The chapel is small and free to enter. Since the mid-twentieth century cyclists have left bicycles, jerseys, photographs and plaques here as votive offerings, and the bicycles hang from the ceiling and the walls. Among them is the last bicycle ridden by Fabio Casartelli, who died in a crash in the 1995 Tour de France.

When the relics no longer fitted in the chapel, the Cycling Museum was built some twenty metres away and opened in 2006. It is a ticketed museum that orders the collection and tells the history of cycling; the chapel and the museum make one visit of about an hour and a half. On the square stand busts of Gino Bartali and Fausto Coppi and the sculptor Elio Ponti's monument to the cyclist, from 1973: two riders, one celebrating victory and one defeated.

From Bellagio's lakeside square the climb is about ten kilometres long, with 550 metres of ascent and ramps around 14% in the first stretch, in the woods. The Giro di Lombardia traditionally rides it, and when the first riders reach the pass the sanctuary bells ring, a custom that began with Don Viganò. On race day the road is closed: if you ride up around then, check the times before you set off.

The name probably comes from the Latin ager magris, dry pastures. At the Bus de la Stria, along the old strada dei Vitt, finds from the Neolithic and the Iron Age have come to light. The first document on Magreglio dates from 1135: a lawsuit between the villagers and the abbot of the monastery of Sant'Ambrogio in Milan over the passage towards Bellagio.

The village was tied to Barni, whose summer pasture it may originally have been, and belonged to its parish until 1613, when Archbishop Federico Borromeo made it a parish of its own in the pieve of Asso. For centuries Magreglio lived on farming and livestock, and umbrellas and sieves were made here. In 1927 it became a hamlet of Civenna, and it was a comune again from 1950. The first Milanese summer visitors arrived in the early twentieth century, and from the 1950s tourism became an important part of the village's economy.

On the village square, the parish church of Santa Marta was built between 1570 and 1613 in place of the oratory of the Santissimo Salvatore. The choir was added in 1891 and the bell tower raised in 1958. On the high altar are a silver altar frontal and a bronze tabernacle chased by Eugenio Bellosio. The feast of Saint Martha, the village's patron, is on 29 July, and on the last Sunday of July a fair is held on the church square.

Casa Begni, from the sixteenth century, stands on the same square. In the old core you see several old doorways, Ca' Mojana, a sixteenth-century monastery, and Ca' del Tay with its lobbie, or loggias. Climbing towards the chestnut woods, at the edge of a villa garden, lies a masso avello, a tomb cut into a boulder, used as a basin.

From the village, half an hour on foot through the chestnut woods and up along the Lambro brings you to the Menaresta, at 942 metres, in the Piano Rancio area. It is the river's source: a natural siphon in the rock from which the water gushes in a cycle of about eight minutes. Up the steep slope opposite the spring, behind a rock, you enter the Bocc de Pegur, a series of connected caves with stalagmites. The Lambro then runs for 130 kilometres through the Brianza, Monza and Milan to the Po.

From the Belvedere Romeo, on the sanctuary square, you see the Grigna, the Lecco branch and the upper lake. From the Ghisallo a road climbs to Piano Rancio, where the shortest route up Monte San Primo begins: about five kilometres and 700 metres of ascent to the highest summit of the Triangolo Lariano, at 1,682 metres.